Dr. Rainer Simon
I'm a Senior Scientist and Research Software Engineer at the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence research group at the Austrian Institute of Technology, where I'm co-leading the Cultural Data Science topic. My projects revolve predominantly around the use of computational approaches, AI and semantic technologies in the Digital Humanities and Digital Library fields. I always had a passion for maps, and in many of my projects I have been dealing with geospatial or cartographic data. Previously, I served as the Technical Director for Pelagios, an international initative that aims to foster better linkages between online resources documenting the past. I am also the technical lead for the open source project Recogito, an award-winning online annotation environment for texts and images.
As an avid software developer for more than 15 years, I've had decent exposure to a range of programming languages, including Java, Python, PHP, Groovy, C# and C++, although my favourite languages nowadays are JavaScript, Scala, and Ruby.
Prior to my current position, I worked as a researcher and project manager at the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna, where I also did my PhD in the area of mobile geospatial applications; and as a systems architect for a major Austrian mobile network operator. (There's also a slightly extended - and more academic - version of my bio available here.)
AWARDS
- Winner of the Open Publishing Awards 2019, first prize, Open Source Software Category with Recogito.
- Winner of the Digital Humanities Awards 2018, Best DH Tool or Suite of Tools category with Recogito.
- Digital Humanities Awards 2016, Best DH Data Visualization category with Peripleo.
- Winner of the Open Humanities Awards 2014, Open Track category.
- Nominated Project Developer of the Year with the Pelagios project at the JISC Geo Programme Awards, London, UK, November 2011.
- First Prize at the EuropeanaTech 2011 Hackathon with the CultureGlobe Demo (video).
- First place at the 2nd International Nokia Ubimedia Mindtrek Award for the Point to Discover research project, at the Mindtrek 2008 Conference, Tampere, Finland, October 2008.
- Best Paper at the W2GIS 2006 Symposium, Hong Kong, China:
Rainer Simon, Peter Fröhlich, Hermann Anegg. Beyond Location Based - The Spatially Aware Mobile Phone. Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Web and Wireless Geographical Information Systems (W2GIS 2006), Hong Kong, China, December 4-5, 2006. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4295/2006, pp 12-21.
- Best Poster at the WWW2004 conference, New York, USA:
Rainer Simon, Michael Jank, Florian Wegscheider. A Generic UIML Vocabulary for Device- and Modality Independent User Interfaces. Poster Proceedings of the 13th International World Wide Web Conference, May 17-22 2004, New York, USA. pp 434-435. ACM Press.
ACTIVITIES & MEMBERSHIPS
- Member of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) Linked Open Data Special Interest Group.
- Member of the International Cartographic Association Commission on Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage.
- Co-organizer of the Linked Pasts 2015 (Jul 20-21, London, UK) and Linked Pasts 2016 (Dec 15-16, Madrid, Spain) conferences
- Programme Commitee member of the LocWeb - International Workshop on Location and the Web - workshop series (2014 - 2018)
- Programme Committee member of the WHiSe - Workshop on Humanities in the Semantic Web - workshop series (2016-1017)
- Programme Committee member of SPHINx 2017 - SPatial Humanities meets Spatial INformation Theory - workshop, September 4, 2017, L'Aquila, Italy
- Programme Commitee member of the EAGLE 2014 International Conference, Paris, France, September 29-30 2014.