Thomas Poetter, Founder & CEO of Compris Technologies AG, graduated in computer science from the University of Kaiserslautern with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics as key focus areas. Working with DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) during his studies, Thomas was one of the first entrepreneurs who received in 1998 a 2 years’ startup stipend from the Fraunhofer society, in his case from the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE). Inspired by Fraunhofer’s success with MP3, Thomas achieved a comparable success with his patented innovations for watermarking text-based contents (eBooks, documents, web pages, etc.) and for secret inconspicuous communication. These are nowadays being used by IBM, SAP/Sybase, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, Nuance, Fuji Xerox, AT&T, Certicom and many others. His company since then has successfully helped 12 DAX30 corporations, the German government and more than another 30 international corporations to achieve significant innovations in the fields of IT architecture, IT security, Big Data and artificial intelligence – improving the lives of more than a billion people.
