+ Meet the READ project partners – Tobias Strauß

What’s your name?

Tobias Strauß.

Where do you work?

CITlab, Institute for Mathematics, University of Rostock.

Tell us a bit about your background…

I am a research assistant at the University of Rostock. My current research interests are natural language processing, information retrieval and decoding.  I work on interpreting the output of the neural networks which are used for Handwritten Text Recognition. I moved to Rostock to study mathematics in 2004 and now live here with my wife and children.  Most of my spare time is spent playing with my children!  If I have some time left over, I like running, card and board games or climbing.

What is your role in the READ project?

CITlab provides the text recognition engine for Transkribus. My tasks relate to the last part of the recognition process, after the neural network and before the textual output of automatically transcribed text.

What is top of your to-do list at the moment?

I am writing reports that we need to submit to the European Commission at the end of each year.  I am also working on integrating language models into the text recognition process and the complicated issue of processing text that has been abbreviated.

What do you like best about working on READ?

I really like the atmosphere.  Everyone I have met during the project has been very kind.  The international scope of the project is very exciting too.  And Günter Mühlberger (READ project coordinator) always has new visions and ideas to challenge us.

If you could do another job for just one day, what would it be?

I like physics, especially astronomy or quantum physics. I would probably study physics. No wait: History! I would like to work in library or a museum. Ancient Egypt, European medieval period… anything. There are so many other interesting jobs…

What can you see out of the window of your office? 

Thanks Tobias!