For more than 12 years, I was working in a small image processing research group at the Saxonian Incubator for Clinical Translation. Since 2019, I joined the neuropysics department at the Max Planck Institute for human cognitive and brain sciences where we work with high-resolution 7T MRI data. My work is about the analysis and quantification of image data and therefore, I’m seeing a lot of MRI, CT, OCT and digitized microscopic data. Sounds boring? It is not. We work on many projects with many interesting people.
I love Wolfram Mathematica. I first came in contact with it during my diploma thesis in 2006 because my mentor used it and all algorithms we had were written in it (and CWEB), I basically had no other choice than to get used to it. Now, I’m very proficient with it as I use it almost every day. In my free-time, I like to help others as much as I can since the beauty of the language, and the underlying concepts are not always obvious to newcomers. Therefore, I’m quite active on mathematica.stackexchange and you can find me there as halirutan.
You will find that I did some nice projects for StackExchange. Shortly after I joined SE, I wrote a language extension for google-code-prettify to support Mathematica. Back then, someone asked a question on stackoverflow whether this would be possible at all and I decided someone should really do this. Now, my implementation (you find it here on GitHub) is used on stackexchange and even on the official Wolfram Community site. Another thing I’m involved at StackExchange is our SE-Tools package that contains a Mathematica palette that lets you share images and code directly from within Mathematica. Additionally, I wrote an extension for the StackExchange editor because there were certain things that could be optimized for people that write answers very often.
My biggest free-time project so far is the Wolfram Language Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. I started it for several reasons. One is that certainly IntelliJ IDEA is the most awesome IDE for Java I have ever seen. And just like Java, the Wolfram language has often pretty long function names that use camel case naming consistently, and the auto-completion of camel case methods was always one mind-blowing feature of IDEA. Another reason for writing such a plugin was that I was pretty sure some awesome code insight features were possible once you have a working parser for the language and you can inspect the abstract syntax tree. Now, some years later, the plugin is widely used and we have fancy code highlighting, auto-completion, refactoring, code formatting, and much more.
In the non-virtual world I have a loving wife and one, two, three, four awesome
kids and enough hobbies to keep me busy around the clock. I love making music and I have been a guitarist and vocalist in
a band for many years. Recently, I switched to drums because let’s face it, it’s just way more fun.
Additionally, I started playing piano for myself some years ago and I’m reasonably good at it now; not in the way like
she is good at it, but probably in the way she is good at it.
I like to draw from time to time, I have a weakness for perspective and
projection, and I’m generally interested in fonts and calligraphy.
