New member: László Grad-Gyenge

We are pleased to introduce the new member of the eCommecre group - László Grad-Gyenge. László studied Computer Science at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. He has experience in the following areas: global optimization (iterative methods), computer vision, natural language processing. His next mission is to study the scale free networks in the social space, and to analyze memes.

László studied computer science at the Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary. He wrote his MSc thesis in the area of global optimization, using iterative methods. He was trying to find good starting points for local searches using function approximators to estimate the space, based on the sample data collected by local searches. He also tried automatic feature extraction to help the function approximators. He finished it in 2001.

To continue his MSc studies, László started a PhD at the same university, in the same area. He applied his search methods in the following areas: satisfiability, geon space, facial expression recognition, exploring the visual cortex of the primates.

Next to his PhD he started to build his own company (www.creo.hu). The primary fields were business application development and web development. For example: http://www.finalexam.eu - an automated text examination system, http://nrk.nive.hu - Europass issuing and adminstration system. He also had innovative projects, that are some of the products of his company, i.e.: www.simplefont.com, www.hellocaptcha.com. His company took his time, so he resigned his PhD status and was building the company for approximately 10 years.

In 2011 he decided to restart his PhD, so László went back to his university, and started to work in the area of computer vision with saliency and eye direction estimation. It was a short story, because after two months his supervisor asked him to switch to the area of natural language processing, and to create a question answering tool, by extracting FAQ information from dialogs. He worked two semesters in the latter area. In the first semester he created a framework called nBoss for web applications in J2EE. The second semester he spent at the University of Vienna as an Erasmus student and built the theoretical background for textual knowledge representation.

As a PhD student László learnt to know Vienna, and liked it very much, so he decided to stay here, if possible. So he applied for the the doctoral college "Adaptive Distributed Systems", he got approved and started to work here in 2012. His next area will be network research. László is planning to study scale free networks and to analyze memes.