Dr. Claudia Müller-Birn studied industrial engineering at Technische Universität Berlin and City University Dublin (Ireland) from April, 1998 to April, 2004. Her majors were telecommunication engineering and business information systems. She wrote her diploma within the research group “E-Learning and Integrated Knowledge Management” and developed a prototype to produce standard compliant content objects. She graduated as Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) with distinction and moved to the Universität Potsdam.
She worked as a research associate at the research group “Corporate Knowledge Management” at the Institute of Social Science and Computer Science, Universität Potsdam from May, 2004 to May, 2008. During this time, she gained profound knowledge of process modelling techniques, knowledge management and software engineering methods. She became increasingly interested in the area of social software and its potential applications in corporate knowledge management. She realized that available modelling techniques are not adequate enough to present structures and activities in virtual spaces. She therefore transferred network analysis techniques into this area. Her research was condensed in her PhD thesis (result: summa cum laude).
In May 2008, she co-founded the open source software project SONIVIS. She is presently leading eight people and their development activities.
After finishing her PhD she was a research associate at the research group “Open Knowledge Models” at the Institute of Information Technology Services (IITS), Department for Computer Science, Electrical Engineering & Information Technology, Universität Stuttgart, from June, 2008 to May, 2009. While she was there, she changed her focus from close corporate settings to open environments such as the World Wide Web. Her research work concentrated on open content projects, based especially on Wikipedia. Existing static approaches of network visualization are extended by dynamic network analysis.
From August 2009, she is going to begin a one year long research project at the Institute for Software Research at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (USA). This research project, which is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, deals with the multidimensional time-based analysis of evolving networks in open source software communities.
