A: I grew up in a small city in Northern Germany, Luneburg heath, I had an inclination and interest in mathematics, physics, molecular biology and chemistry, so there was never any doubt that I would study something in this direction. I ended up starting with physics and then focused on mathematics when I realized that you can only deeply understand physics via mathematics.
In terms of languages, I learned English and Latin at school, which I did not enjoy much in terms of having to memorize all the vocabulary, but I then went to the US for six weeks when in high school. This was a great experience for me in many ways, and it was there that I connected with people and explored a different culture via another language. I really enjoyed it, so I decided to give another try to French too by taking a course in France when I was at university. I think that is a great way to learn a lot in a very short period of time. Language is meant for talking and connecting to people and that’s how the brain is wired. I spent a wonderful month in the Gascogne, with a bursary from the German Merit Foundation, and what I learned there provided me with enough knowledge of French to get me through a year of my PhD in France later on.
A: Something that not many people know about me is that I used to be on stage as an amateur for a few years. I was part of a theatrical group of fifty very gifted people. We performed a modernized version of carnival, similar to stand-up comedy but without the improv, which involved dancing as well. My role was making fun of intellectuals. We met very frequently and worked hard to put on performances every year. It was a huge success, our events were always sold out, with audiences in the region of 400 people, who waited in long queues for hours to get tickets. I stayed in that group for eleven years until we ended it, given the substantial load on the increasingly aging group, on the climax of our success (laughs).
I was amazed to experience how this group worked, though on the surface it seemed as if it lacked structure. I later realized that this is how it was being managed by the two leading guys, who let the creative group experience maximum freedom while making sure nothing went astray. It was a very clever approach for leading an anti-authoritarian group (such as artists or scientists) and I try to mimic it in managing the AppTek office here in Aachen. It might not have worked without the quality of the group members, most of whom were quite established in the artistic field and knew what to do and so performance quality overall was excellent. I try to mimic that too, by always hiring the best talent out there to join our office.
A: Yes, I studied what is called ‘complex analysis’ for my PhD, which is basically calculus with complex numbers rather than real numbers, in many dimensions and with singularities. When I was about to leave the math department of my university after my PhD, instead of taking the trodden road of embarking in an academic career in the field, I decided to go into research in something new and interesting. It was pure chance that I came across a job ad by Philips in Hamburg who were working in speech recognition, and I took it. I found the topic of teaching computers to listen appealing, though I was somewhat worried it might not be challenging enough. Luckily it was, and I learned all about it from the young research group leader, the now internationally renowned Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Ney.
This was the first major turning point in my life: after spending eight years in mathematics, I turned to a completely new field, which I found fresh, intriguing, intellectually stimulating and promising with respect to a career. The next turning point in my career had to do with moving from research to management. This started while at Philips, when I had to work with a product group in Vienna and manage technical staff. My first "pure management" position, where I could no longer rely on my own deeply rooted technical knowledge, was Technical Manager at Plettac Electronics, where I managed the company’s transition from analog to digital. I now, among others, manage a group of scientists at AppTek, which is quite special, extremely enjoyable and also hard work – they do keep you on your toes!
A: It would have been natural for me to move to the Silicon Valley or abroad in general, but I wanted to stay in Germany for personal reasons, so the offer from AppTek to head up their European headquarters in Aachen came as a great opportunity to support my lifestyle. It was an ideal fit for both parties: I had the combination of research and business skills that AppTek needed and they made me a job offer that involved all the tasks I enjoyed working on. But the main reason behind my decision to join AppTek was the people in the company. I knew that it included many highly competent people among its staff and I was asked to lead this amazing scientific team, which has grown fivefold since I took over.
I have worked in both large and small companies in my career and they both have their pros and cons. Smaller companies tend to be more agile and flexible and you can easily cut through the hierarchy and reach a decision faster. Larger companies have more resources, but they also tend to be more bureaucratic, which I strongly dislike as it doesn’t create any value. The scientific team at AppTek has been of a particularly high calibre since the very beginning, as the company’s Director of Science is none other than Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Ney, who I had worked with before. The company therefore manages to combine the benefits of a start-up with a scientific calibre akin to that of much larger organizations, which really appealed to me.
My role at AppTek involves not only managing the scientific team and helping our brilliant young scientists grow, but also building the company’s presence in Europe, in particular in the media and entertainment sector. I find the job itself very interesting, as it is both intellectually stimulating and fun. In order to be successful in our field, you need to be technically excellent, which you achieve by employing a rigid scientific methodology, as we do at university to solve scientific problems. At AppTek we go beyond this and apply a scientific methodology even to solving customer problems of a commercial nature, such as optimizing workflows or extending business, or by helping them figure out technical options to solve a problem they have. I find that a very interesting aspect to work on.
A: Focusing on the media and entertainment market was a strategic decision of the AppTek board, which I happily took on as I relate to media in many ways – I have always been a cinephile, my older son is a professional musician, plus I spent a few years on stage as an amateur actor.
Although AppTek is one of the best language technology companies in the world, it still competes with giants, like Amazon and Google, who have the ability to scale and offer good products at such a low cost that it can drive everyone smaller out of the market. But giants don’t operate well on smaller scales. As a result, the strategy of choice for smaller companies is to work on something specialized that is outside the strategic scope of business of the tech giants. Media and entertainment is such a market, not large enough for them, but big enough for smaller companies that choose to create a specialized offering for it. At the same, the sector raises the bar on quality requirements, which provides a competitive advantage to AppTek, as this is where the company excels.
Media and entertainment is not only a growing market globally, but also the fastest growing localization sector. It is therefore good strategy to enter it at its infancy, so that you are one of the established players once it grows bigger. By then you have a competitive advantage over others by getting on the learning curve early and having done a lot of the preparatory work, such as pre-processing of data and customer specific model training. On top of this, media deals with video and therefore utilizes and calls for the use of all of AppTek’s resources, whether it is ASR, MT, TTS or NLP. In short, it is an ideal choice of market to go after, as its requirements fit precisely the capabilities, size, specialization and customer dedication that AppTek has to offer – and it is a fun market to be in no less!
The most ambitious research project that the AppTek team is currently working on and which we are all very excited about is Speech-to-Speech (S2S) translation. The technology has applications both in media, by way of revoicing, but also in interpreting, which is another localization sector that is experiencing a high growth rate and is being heavily disrupted.
AppTek.ai is a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies for automatic speech recognition (ASR), neural machine translation (NMT), natural language processing/understanding (NLP/U), large language models (LLMs) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies. The AppTek platform delivers industry-leading solutions for organizations across a breadth of global markets such as media and entertainment, call centers, government, enterprise business, and more. Built by scientists and research engineers who are recognized among the best in the world, AppTek’s solutions cover a wide array of languages/ dialects, channels, domains and demographics.
