Hannes Maraisprofessor

I was born and raised in South Africa. In the early nineties I left for Switzerland, where I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (better known as ETH Zurich). In 1996 I moved to California, and since then I am happily working in Silicon Valley. I've held research positions at the Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center (which later became Compaq SRC) and also at AltaVista Research. My research focused on various web technologies, new user interfaces, and domain specific programming languages. In September 2000, I joined as founding engineer at REVERSi networks, a networking startup in Sunnyvale. The company went out of business after about a year with the meltdown in the space. I subsequently joined Vendavo, a price optimization company in Palo Alto, building Java-based enterprise software for Global Fortune 500 companies. In April of 2004 I joined Metreo, also in the same space, as member of the executive staff and chief software architect. At Vendavo and Metreo I worked on developing in-memory databases for high-speed analytics, long before it became trendy. In 2006 I started an online collaboration startup called Kalexo in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) space. Initially bootstrapped, the company eventually received series A funding from Founders Fund and a number of angel investors, and was used at a number of very well known companies. In 2011, Kalexo was sold to Autodesk where I worked on building information management systems in the cloud, strategic product development, and managing a small team of software architects and engineers. I left Autodesk the tail end of 2012 to start a new venture called Oumy, a new multimedia collaboration system for designers and visual thinkers. I am in a fortunate position that I can bootstrap Oumy, and that I have the help of a few trusted advisors. I am proud of the fact that many products that I helped conceptualize, architect, design, build and deploy, are in daily use by a large number of people. Some of the products I developed were category defining, especially in pricing analytics. My areas of interest are very diverse - my computer science training is in user interfaces, but I've also been active in the area of Information Retrieval (in particular the intersection of IR and the World Wide Web), analytical databases, distributed algorithms, data visualization, domain specific programming languages, and various cloud technologies.