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These pages give some ideas of the topics I have worked on during the last years. They include links to further reading and some of my publications (partly in German).

The way information and data are represented and processed by (traditional von-Neumann) computers is very different from the way humans remember and processes knowledge. In some cases computers are therefore helpful tools for humans. But in many other cases these differences lead to problems in the use of computers.

A better understanding of the way humans remember and process knowledge can help to adapt computer programs to the needs of their human users (and is of course an exciting area of research in its own). Studying new models of computing can - on the other side - support the understanding of some features of human information processing. Many of the projects I have been involved in during the last decade have been linked to these questions in one way or the other.

Positions and Projects

Since September 2004

Professor at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, department "Media" (Information Science).

April 2000 to September 2002

Technical project manager of an EU-project on eLearning at the FernUni Hagen,

November 1994 to October 1999

Senior scientist in the department "Advanced Retrieval Support for Digital Libraries" at the Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems (IPSI) of GMD - the German National Research Center for Information Technology (now Fraunhofer Gesellschaft),

1995 to 2000

Lecturer on Information Retrieval and Data Mining at the Darmstadt University of Technology

November 1989 to October 1994

Research scientist at the Uni - GH Paderborn Cognitive Psychology Group

1986 to 1989

PhD student at the department of Mathematics of the University of Marburg. Dissertation on cellular automata.

The question of appropriate representation of knowledge for humans and machines is also a central topic of my recently published book: "Information Retrieval - Suchmodelle und Data-Mining-Verfahren für Textsammlungen und das Web" (dpunkt-Verlag, Heidelberg)

I hope these pages provide some useful information and links, and appreciate your comments (and critiques if necessary ...)

Reginald Ferber