Michael is a Sr. Software Development Engineer with Amazon Web Services. In his role as lead architect for Neptune’s query optimization stack, he works both with AWS customers and internal development teams to improve Amazon Neptune’s performance, scalability, and user experience.

metaphacts is a Germany-based company offering products, solutions and services for describing, interchanging and querying graph data, as well as a user-oriented open platform for visualizing and interacting with knowledge graphs.The metaphacts team offers an unmatched experience and know-how around enterprise knowledge graphs for our clients in areas such as business, finance, life science, and cultural heritage. The metaphactory is our end-to-end platform to create and utilize enterprise knowledge graphs - from semantic graph data management to data-driven application development. Built entirely on open standards and technologies, our platform covers the entire lifecycle of dealing with knowledge graphs. As a main benefit our platform enables knowledge workers to create and gain meaningful insight into their data with one comprehensive software solution.

As a Research Manager, I was responsible for the acquisition and coordination of national and international research projects within IMC’s innovation department. The main focus of my activities was on (i) the integration of social interaction and social network features into the IMC Learning Portal, a user friendly E-Learning portal for delivering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to learners, (ii) the didactical design and technical implementation of an online learning course for carers of people burdened with Young Onset Dementia, and (iii) the design and implementation of context-sensitive assistance systems supporting “learning on the job” in the construction industry and within the Industry 4.0 context.Acting at the interface between research and industrial-strength software development, I was responsible for the technical design of Web-based prototype implementations carried out in the research projects. In this role, I coordinated the project specific development activities, constantly pushing innovation transfer into IMC’s established product portfolio. In addition to the technical responsibilities, I was disciplinary responsible for a team of five persons working in IMC’s research department.

Coming along with the proliferation of standards and tools developed in the course of the W3C Semantic Web initiative, semantic technologies are becoming increasingly important also in the context of managing enterprise data. These technologies bear a great potential for data integration from heterogeneous source, ease data mash-up with free, open data, and novel data interaction paradigms for unified data exploration, visualization, and augmentation. In my work at fluid Operations, I was involved in the development of a generic platform for semantic data self-service application development, called Information Workbench. On top of this platform, we developed customized solutions for a variety of application domains, such as for Enterprise Cloud data management, life science data management, and the media domain.

From July 2007 to Dec 2009 I have been a PhD student in the database and information systems group in Freiburg, headed by Professor Georg Lausen. I finished my PhD ("Dr. rer. nat.") in December 2009, defending my thesis about SPARQL query optimization. From January 2010 to April 2010 I have been working as a postdoc in the database and information systems group in Freiburg.

During my time at Saarland University I worked together with Prof. Christoph Koch (now at EPFL), mainly on efficient and effective XML stream processing.

Visiting Scientist in the Cornell Database Group