Big Data is kind of Allan’s thing. He is Professor for Data Intelligence at the TU Wien and a faculty member at the Complexity Science Hub, where he leads research and innovation to make sense of unstructured data. Allan is also the initiator of the Austrian ICT Lighthouse Project for Data Market Austria, an organization devoted to developing the Data Services Ecosystem in Austria. He acted as scientific coordinator of the EU-funded Khresmoi Integrated Project on medical and health information search and analysis, which later spun off to become contextflow. Allan is an active Co-Founder, securing grants and disseminating our research and vision at conferences around the globe. He also coordinated the EU-funded VISCERAL project on evaluation of algorithms on big data and the EU-funded KConnect project on technology for analysing medical text. Allan is prolific: he is author/co-author of 150+ publications in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences. His areas of research include Data Science, Information Retrieval, Semantic Analysis and Search, Information Retrieval Evaluation, Recommender Systems, Data Mining and Machine Learning. Born in South Africa, he holds a MSc in Physics from the University of Cape Town and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris.

Favorite meal: Braaivleis (South African BBQ)

Recommended reading: Anathem by Neal Stephenson

People would be surprised to learn…I’m from South Africa. Other than that, I’m pretty unsurprising.

If I wasn’t working as a Co-Founder and Professor of Data Intelligence, I would be…I do so many things! This question is too difficult to answer!

Most rewarding part of my job: Getting a positive decision on a grant application