About

From Michael G. Noll

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Contents

Resume

Image:Michael 250x250.png

I am of German nationality and was born in 1980. From 1999-2004, I studied Wirtschaftsinformatik (combination of Computer Science and Business Economics) with a major in Electronic Publishing at the University of Trier, Germany.

At the same time, I worked as a scientific assistant at the Fraunhofer-administered Institute for Telematics in Trier, Germany, for research and development in information security. Here, I co-developed the patented IT security solution Lock-Keeper and turned the prototype into a ready-to-run product now distributed by SIEMENS Switzerland. The Lock-Keeper received awards such as the Inventors’ Award of Rhineland-Palatinate/Germany in 2002 and the German IT Security Award in 2007. My work at the institute included network security consulting and evaluation, particularly for financial service providers in Germany. I also co-authored several studies and technical reports; for example, "Firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems" for the German Ministry of Education, Science and Culture (MWWFK).

To increase the challenge, I additionally joined a Luxembourgian IT startup (focus: ISP and IT services) as Security and Network Engineer from 2000-2003. Here, I shared the responsibility for setting up and operating the ISP's Autonomous System with national and international connections to customers and carriers. On the software engineering side, I was jointly responsible for designing and developing the initial network monitoring platform as well as the IP accounting software.

In 2004, I received the University Diploma with Distinction in Wirtschaftsinformatik from the University of Trier, Germany, and the university award for best diploma of graduation year. My six-month external diploma project at an international company was the commercial and technical evaluation of content management systems. At the end, my recommended product with a 6-figure contract volume was indeed procured and rolled out. It has since become the global content management system of the company.

From 2004-2009, I worked abroad in Luxembourg as a Researcher (Industrial Doctoral Student) in Computer Science at the satellite operator SES ASTRA S.A. and as a member of a bi-national Ph.D. program (cotutelle de thèse) between the Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany, and the University of Luxembourg. My research was part of the Safer Internet Project, a joint R&D project between SES ASTRA S.A. and the Hasso Plattner Institute. My research interests have been mainly within the fields of the Social Web, Information Retrieval and Information Security. Feel free to browse my publications for more information about my scientific work. On the development side, I have designed and implemented various product prototypes and software applications in the project such as a scalable collaborative Web content filter, and am the co-author of a patent application in this area filed in 2007.

Since 2009, I have been working as Business Analyst in the area of Information Security within the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police in Switzerland – a very interesting challenge in a highly sensitive environment.

When I'm not working, I spend my time on various hobbies: art, astronomy, books & literature, Go, history, music, photography, research & development [sic!] and sports.

Objectives

A. Doing things that haven't been done before.
B. Working at a place where I can both contribute and learn.
C. Doing A and B in the company of like-minded people.

I enjoy having a versatile field of activity with an impact in a fast-paced environment. Similarly, I like tackling difficult problems and solving them in practice, particularly with free and open source software. The best way to get me interested in something is when it's about doing things that haven't been done before. That's why I enjoy getting my hands dirty with tools like Hadoop, Python, git or Firefox Add-Ons.

Awards and Patents

2007 Co-inventor, European and International (PCT) Patent Application "Enhancing satellite bandwidth usage through user-driven content filtering and content recommendation" filed with SES ASTRA S.A. (patent pending).
2006 Best paper award for "Design and Anatomy of a Social Web Filtering Service", Conference on Cooperative Internet Computing, Hong Kong.
2004 University Award for best diploma/master of graduation year.
2002 Inventor's Award of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, as member of the developer team of the patented network security solution Lock-Keeper.
1998 School Award for best German Abitur (general qualification for university admission) of class 1991. Skipped one year based on teacher's recommendation.

Publications and Talks

My publications and talks are listed separately.

Book Reviews

I have reviewed several book proposals in the past, and appreciate the trust that publishers such as Wiley-Blackwell or Manning have put in me. For reason of confidentiality, I will only list books that are in print already or will be published soon.

Projects

Here are some projects I've been working on.

  • Safer Internet Project - research and development project for providing a technical solution for a more protected use of the Internet for families, schools, and Internet users in general
  • SPEAR Algorithm - "Spamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking"; our algorithm published at ACM SIGIR Conference in 2009 for finding experts and high-quality information in open systems, particularly social networks
  • DeliciousAPI - a Python library for accessing the Delicious.com social bookmarking service
  • CABS120k08 - long term project: a large research data set about Web metadata based on a sample of 120,000 web documents with data retrieved from the Open Directory Project, the AOL Search query log corpus AOL500k, Google PageRank, Delicious.com, and anchor text from incoming hyperlinks
  • DMOZ100k06 - long term project: a large research data set about document metadata based on a random sample of 100,000 web documents from the Open Directory combined with data retrieved from Delicious.com/Yahoo!, Google, and ICRA
  • Cookie Monster for XMLHttpRequest - how to remove cookies from XMLHttpRequest for Mozilla browsers
  • Cross Validation Module for Python - a small but nifty Python module for statistical evaluations
  • GooDiff - a prototype of an online service for monitoring changes in legal documents (read my introductive GooDiff article aka "the inauguration speech")

Recent Photos

I'm an avid photographer and started my hobby with digital equipment in 2006. Some photos are available on my photoblog. Here's the latest picture.


Favorite Poem

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
— Fire and Ice, 1920, by Robert Frost

About this website

Version 3.0 of this website is powered by free and open source software, most notably:

  • MediaWiki - free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia (design based on sgumax 3.1 by Paul Gu)
  • WordPress - semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability
  • Pixelpost - authentic photoblog flavour

And if you wonder why the subtitle of the website is "My digital moleskine", it's because I enjoy writing notes on, well, moleskines.

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