Christoph Auer
Senior Research Scientist at IBM
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChristoph Auer is a Senior Research Scientist based in Zurich with six years of industry experience building research-driven software at IBM after a PhD and medical informatics diploma from Heidelberg. He blends deep academic rigor from a long biomedical research background with hands-on engineering, shipping backend and DevOps improvements for document-processing pipelines such as the open-source docling project. At docling he improved table extraction, adaptive OCR, page-by-page parsing, and added AsciiDoc/Markdown import and debug tooling—practical work that shortens the path from messy PDFs to generative-AI-ready documents. Known for tightening pipeline timings and robust backend fixes, he focuses on making complex ML/data systems reliable and reproducible in production. Colleagues value his ability to translate research ideas into maintainable engineering solutions across large teams and codebases.
6 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Doktor (Ph.D.), Doktor (Ph.D.) at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Github Skills (8)
ocr10
pdf-processing10
ocra10
python10
cicd6
markdown-it5
html5
markdown5
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
docling-project/docling
Jul 2024 - Apr 2025
Get your documents ready for gen AI
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:1 release, 207 reviews, 113 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Christoph's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the document processing capabilities of the `docling` project, including improving table extraction quality and adding configuration options for PDF conversions. They implemented adaptive OCR, fixed issues with the DoclingParse backend and the page-by-page parsing, and added support for AsciiDoc and Markdown input formats. The user also worked on pipeline timings and established debug settings for the project.
aiconvertdocument-parserdocument-parsingdocx
docling-project/docling-core
Sep 2024 - Apr 2025
A python library to define and validate data types in Docling.
Contributions:140 reviews, 49 PRs, 118 pushes in 7 months
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