Who are you?
I’m Andreas; I live with my family in Jena and I love to play table tennis at a high level for the university sports club. I studied physics in Bayreuth and Göttingen and completed my PhD in Mainz. Just as I’d finished my PhD thesis on the swarming behaviour of microswimmers and was looking around the job market for opportunities outside academia, the lockdown hit – and I received an invitation to a job interview at ICO-LUX. I’ll never forget that I was the only guest at the hotel back then! Despite the surreal circumstances, I immediately got along well with the ICO-LUX team on a personal level, so I moved to Jena and I still really like to be working here.
What exactly do you do at ICO-LUX?
I programme in C++, develop fraud detection rules and now mainly focus on the banking sector. I do a lot of matching – in other words, I ask: How can information be extracted automatically from documents? With the highest possible recognition rates, even for the most unusual document layouts? As the team is constantly growing, I’ve also started coordinating new colleagues more often.
What connects you to ICO-LUX?
Short distances – literally, too, as we live just a few hundred metres from the office. So sometimes I also work as a caretaker or parcel rescuer. And, of course, over the years, a lot of my thoughts have gone into the product, which creates a strong sense of connection. I really like the detective-like aspect of our work, the social relevance. When you’ve come up with a rule, programmed it and applied it to a dataset, and then it catches fraud – that’s a brilliant feeling! I also really value the team and appreciate the flexible, family-friendly working conditions. For example, I’ve just come back from a mini-sabbatical. I spent a few weeks travelling around France with my partner and our two little sons – with a shared car and a tent. Some screen-free time – it’s been nice a change!
Photo (private): Andreas in southern France - thanks to a mini-Sabbatical.