Thomas Roelleke holds a Dr rer nat (Ph.D.) and a Diplom der Ingenieur-Informatik (MSc in Engineering & Computer Science) of the University of Dortmund. After school education in Meschede, Germany, he attended the b.i.b., the Nixdorf Computer school for professions in informatics, in Paderborn. Nixdorf Computer awarded him a sales and management trainee program, after which he was appointed as product consultant in the Unix/DB/4GL marketing of Nixdorf Computer. He studied Diplom-Ingenieur-Informatik at the University of Dortmund (UniDo), and was later a lecturer/researcher at UniDo. His research focused on probabilistic reasoning and knowledge representations, hypermedia retrieval, and the integration of retrieval and database technologies. His lecturing included information/database systems, object-oriented design and programming, and software engineering. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1999 for the thesis titled "POOL: A probabilistic object-oriented logic for the representation and retrieval of complex objects - a model for hypermedia retrieval." Since 1999, he has been working as a strategic IT consultant, founder and director of small businesses, research fellow, and lecturer at the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). Research contributions include a probabilistic relational algebra (PRA), a probabilistic object-oriented logic (POOL), the relational Bayes, a matrix-based framework for IR, a parallel derivation of IR models, a probabilistic interpretation of the BM25-TF based on "semi-subsumed" event occurrences, and theoretical studies of retrieval models. Thomas Roelleke lives in England, in a village in the middle between buzzy London and beautiful East Anglia.
