Christopher Kurtz
Alumni (Diploma Thesis Student & Student Assistant
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IVU Traffic Technologies AG
After completing Code Gestalt (Diploma Thesis), I've started working at IVU Traffic Technologies AG as software engineer as of January 2nd 2012. The company provides software for public transportation providers, including ASEAG. I'll be working with a product independent platform team to contribute some user oriented thinking and usability considerations. So next time you have a bad UX with a ticket terminal or overhear a bus driver cursing at his on-board computer, I'll want to know.
Code Gestalt
Code Gestalt got its own project page!
Kicking off Leonhard Lichtschlag's new field of research "Code Gestalt", my diploma thesis focuses on developing new ways to explore source code visually. You can read the draft of my proposal here. The goal is to achieve a better and faster understanding of unknown code and improve developer communication. For this purpose I have written an Eclipse plug-in over the course of this thesis. The Java code analysis is powered by JTransformer and Cultivate from Institute for Computer Science III, University of Bonn. If you want to take a look at a Silverlight mock-up, visit this prototype and leave me some feedback with the built in tools. The implementation of the Eclipse plug-in was finished in November 2010, and evaluation was performed at the RWTH Aachen and the University of Bonn. You can download the final version of the thesis below. An Extended Abstract about Code Gestalt was accepted at the CHI 2011 Student Research Competition in Vancouver.
Former projects
As a student assistant I was working on the experimental input device TWEND. I am there for things related to SDL, OpenGL and evil Windows stuff. My favorite programming language is still C++, but I have also done projects in Objective-C, Managed C++, C#, Java, PHP and pure C. I got the job as student assistant at least partially because of my group's final DIS II project "Firefly" (not related with the sooo cool Joss Whedon series), for which I wrote the 3d engine.
Furthermore I have been working on a little Windows tool that enables Personal Orchestra to use data from the OptiTrack infrared camera for input. On my previous student assistant job at i11 I wrote a multi-tasking OS in C and assembler.
My adviser for TWEND was Gero Herkenrath. The Personal Orchestra project is supervised by Thorsten Karrer.
Publications:
- Christopher Kurtz. Code Gestalt: From UML Class Diagrams to Software Landscapes. Diploma Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, April 2011.
- Christopher Kurtz. Code Gestalt: A Software Visualization Tool for Human Beings. In CHI EA 2011: CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 929–934, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 2011.
