Hello, I'm Falco

I'm a 34-year-old Software Developer and Researcher, interested in declarative programming, web development and chess.


Location

Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Germany

Chess

Arbiter

Since October 2013 I'm an international FIDE-Arbiter. I was Chief Arbiter of several Elo-rated tournaments, e.g. the German Youth Championship or in the German Bundesliga.

Developer

In 2014, with a friend I founded the chess.io GmbH. It aims to develop web-based applications for chess players, e.g. to manage chess tournaments online. Some of its related projects are listed below.

Organiser

For the German Chess Youth I have organized tournaments with several hundred players each.

Player

DWZ: 1886
Elo: 1838

Experience

Industry
Academic Services
05/2023 — Present

SUSI&James GmbH

Lead Software Engineer

Mannheim, Germany
01/2023 — 04/2023

chess.io GmbH

Full Stack Web Developer

Bad Segeberg, Germany (remote)

Full stack web development, devops

03/2021 — 12/2022

DFKI

Researcher

Kaiserslautern, Germany

Research & Development in the context of sustainable urban development in DFKI's SmartCity Living Lab (SCLL), in cooperation with the city of Kaiserslautern
Supervision of a Master thesis and two seminar papers

10/2019 — 02/2021

chess.io GmbH

Full Stack Web Developer

Bad Segeberg, Germany (remote)

Development of a webshop based on Magento 2, migration of the existing webshop, full stack web development, devops

10/2015 — 09/2019

University of Würzburg

Research Fellow

Würzburg, Germany

Teaching Assistant for the lectures »Logic in Computer Science«, »Deductive Databases«, »Logic Programming«, »Databases«, and »Advanced Databases«
Supervision of six Master and Bachelor theses, as well as of multiple practical courses and seminar papers

02/2012 — 09/2015

Ulm University

Research Assistant

Ulm, Germany

Teaching Assistant for the lectures »Programming Paradigms«, »Logic in Computer Science«, »Web Engineering«, and »Algorithms and Data Structures«

02/2015 — 04/2015

chess.io GmbH

Student Web Developer

Hamburg, Germany (remote)

Development of a webshop based on Magento

03/2010 — 02/2012

Nokia

Working Student

Ulm, Germany

Department Engineering Tools and Platform Solutions
Development of tools to manage the IT environment, based on Ruby on Rails

Education

2015 — 2022

University of Würzburg

Ph.D. in Computer Science

Würzburg, Germany

Doctoral Thesis »Defining and Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Prolog« (magna cum laude), supervised by Prof. Dr. Dietmar Seipel

2014 — 2015

Ulm University

Master of Computer Science

Ulm, Germany

Applied Subject Mathematics, graduated with distinction
Master Thesis »CHR.js: Compiling Constraint Handling Rules to JavaScript« [PDF], supervised by Prof. Dr. Thom Frühwirth

2010 — 2014

Ulm University

Bachelor of Computer Science

Ulm, Germany

Applied Subject Mathematics
Bachelor Thesis »From XML Schema to JSON Schema – Comparison and Translation with Constraint Handling Rules« [PDF], supervised by Prof. Dr. Thom Frühwirth

Awards

Happy times!

Jugendehrung

Deutsche Sportjugend, 2021

For my many years of service to German youth chess, the German Sports Youth (Deutsche Sportjugend, dsj) in the German Olympic Sports Confederation awarded me their youth honor.


Best Paper Award

SLATE 2019, Coimbra, Portugal

Best Paper Award at the 8th Symposium on Languages, Applications, Technologies (SLATE) for »Definite Clause Grammars with Parse Trees: Extension for Prolog« (F. Nogatz, D. Seipel and S. Abreu).


Full Student Grants

FLoC 2018 and RuleML+RR 2018

For participation and talks at the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC) in Oxford, and the International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning (RuleML+RR) in Luxembourg.


Goldener Binärbaum

Preis für Gute Lehre 2018

The golden binary tree is awarded by the Institute of Computer Science, University of Würzburg, for good teaching.


Public Choice Award

Deutsche Bahn Hackathon, Berlin 2016

At the 5th hackathon of the german railway company I implemented a best-price lookup which can combine splittings of special-price tickets. The browser extension and Prolog backend was built in a day.


Special Award

Deutsche Bahn Hackathon, Frankfurt 2015

I took part in the very first hackathon of Deutsche Bahn, and implemented a routing service that considers historic delay data. The web application was built within only 24 hours and also received the Public Choice Award.

Publications

Journal
Conference
Thesis

Community Service

in Academia
01

Local Organiser

International Conference on Declarative Programming (Declare), 19.—22. September 2017 in Würzburg, Germany

02

PC Chair

2022 — WLP

03

PC Member

2024 — KI
2022 — KI
2019 — WLP

04

Referee

2022 — Constraints, KI, WLP
2021 — RuleML+RR
2019 — INAP, WLP
2018 — ICLP, COMLAN, WFLP
2017 — ICLP, COMLAN, SLATE, INAP, WFLP
2016 — IJA, SLATE, WLP

Student Supervision

Master Thesis
Bachelor Thesis
Project
Seminar

Open Topics

Subjects offered at SUSI&James GmbH.

  • Static Query Analysis for MongoDB

    BA/Project

    Static analysis of SQL is a common technique to identify potentially inperformant queries, possible query optimisations and improved data structuring and indexing. However, it is only rarely applied for documented-oriented databases, because of their flexible syntax. In this work, a tool for static source code analysis for MongoDB queries should be implemented. For normal queries, it identifies data structures that should be indexed. In addition, queries based on MongoDB's powerful yet often slower aggregation pipeline are automatically transformed into equivalent native MongoDB queries based on .find().

    • MongoDB
    • query optimisation
    • static code analysis

Teaching

AAI

Applied Artificial Intelligence

Seminar at DFKI Kaiserslautern
WS22 | SS22 | WS21

DDB

Deductive Databases

Teaching Assistant for the lecture at the University of Würzburg
SS18 | SS17 | SS16

LP

Logic Programming

Teaching Assistant for the lecture at the University of Würzburg
WS18

DB

Databases

Teaching Assistant for the lecture at the University of Würzburg
WS17 | WS16

LOG

Logic in Computer Science

Teaching Assistant for the lecture at the University of Würzburg
WS18 | WS17 | WS16 | WS15

RBS

Databases & Rule-Based Systems

Practical course at the University of Würzburg
WS18 | WS17 | WS16

ADB

Advanced Database and Logic Programming Concepts

Seminar at the University of Würzburg
SS19 | SS18 | SS17 | SS16