kooaba: Image Recognition and Visual Search

Management

Dr. Herbert Bay

Co-Founder & CEO

Herbert Bay holds a PhD in Computer Vision Studies from the ETH Zurich (2006) where he developed the famous SURF algorithm for image feature detection and description used for image recognition, augmented reality as well as various other computer vision applications.

Before his PhD, he received a Master's Degree in Microengineering from EPF Lausanne. After his graduation, he joined IBM Switzerland where he was thoroughly trained in project management, sales, and communication. Soon he was helping customers address their critical business challenges for e-learning projects as an Engagement Manager. He was also entrusted with teaching internal communication courses in Zurich and Geneva.

During his time at kooaba, Herbert followed an entrepreneurial workshop at Babson College, in Boston MA (2007) as well as an Executive MBA workshop in Palo Alto, CA (2008) held by the renown business school IMD.

Besides his passion for Internet startups and entrepreneurship, Herbert is fund of offshore sailing.

Join Herbert on LinkedIn

Dr. Till Quack

Co-Founder & CTO

Till's Blog @tmdq

Till Quack received his PhD from the Computer Vision Lab at the ETH Zurich in 2009, after having completed his Master’s Degree in Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the same institution in 2004.

A stay in Palo Alto in 1998 sparked his interested in entrepreneurship and the World Wide Web. Shortly afterwards, he founded Quack Information Architecture. The company delivered web-development services and was among the first in Switzerland to propagate standards-based XHTML and CSS code to their clients. In 2001 he started one of the first blogs in Switzerland.

From 1998-2004 Till Quack studied Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the ETH Zurich, in Switzerland. He completed his Master’s Thesis at the University of California in Santa Barbara, where he contributed to the development of Cortina, a large-scale content-based image search engine for the WWW. Cortina is one of the first image search engines, searching millions of images. The combination of image recognition and the World-Wide Web unites his technological passions and led him to pursue a PhD in the same field.