Chris Hammerschmidt

After spending some time in academia, Chris co-founded APTA Technologies, a TU Delft spin-off, where he and his team works on making real impact with machine-learning for log-data and cyber-data. APTA Technologies picks up log data collected in typical log solutions, such as the ELK stack, and extracts insightful and actionable visual descriptions of the data. These are used for fast root-cause analysis and provide deep insights for non-technical stakeholders. With insights at hand, the models behind the visual descriptions are then used for predictive future insights.

In general, he is excited about mathematics and interested in the plethora of applications and opportunities it offers, in particular---but not limited to----in computer science and communication technology.

Interests

Over the course of his academic career, Chris has most enjoyed working in the abstract -- using formal systems and investigating their limits. He is interested in answering questions about their expressive power and capability to predict or explain the world. In addition, he has also worked with complex systems, analyzing their properties as well as developing models to understand and forecast their behavior.

For Chris, the draw of these fields lies in the flexibility of their applications, which range from the social sciences to engineering, from bio-informatics to cognitive science, from physics to finance.

This intellectual curiosity and passion for applying mathematics in a transdisciplinary way has led Chris to pursue psychology, linguistics, and politics, beyond the standard mathematics and computer science classes required by his degree program.

In his free time, Chris enjoys learning new languages (currently, Mandarin and Spanish), reading (especially science fiction, thrillers and fantasy novels), and athletics (he particularly enjoys skiing whenever he has the chance).

Education

Chris finished the thesis for his Diplom in Informatik (German equivalent of an MS in mathematics and computer science) in 2013 and his PhD in computer science in 2017.