Ralph Gasser
Senior Software Engineer, IT Consultant And Partner at pontius software GmbH
Trimbach, Solothurn, Switzerland
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRalph Gasser is a Senior Software Engineer, IT consultant and partner with 13 years of experience building practical software solutions for SMEs while bridging academic research and production systems. He holds a summa cum laude PhD in Computer Science from the University of Basel and has applied that research expertise to scalable multimedia search, vector-nearest-neighbor systems and open-source retrieval projects like vitrivr and Cottontail DB. At pontius software he helps clients with requirements, architecture, project management and hands-on development, combining rigorous engineering with clear communication. Formerly a postdoc coordinating Horizon Europe research collaborations and teaching core CS labs, he brings both mentorship and academic rigor to commercial projects. Based in Switzerland, he pairs entrepreneurial pragmatism with a scientist’s curiosity—equally comfortable sketching system architectures or shipping production code.
14 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc), Nanoscience, 4.8, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Nanoscience, 4.8 at Universität BaselEnglish Language and Literature, General, A, English Language and Literature, General, A at ILSC Education Group, VancouverDoktor (Ph.D.), Computer Science, 6.0 (Summa cum laude), Doktor (Ph.D.), Computer Science, 6.0 (Summa cum laude) at University of BaselEnglish for Work, A, English for Work, A at EC English Language Centres
English, German
Github Skills (39)
similarity-search10
evaluation10
feature-extraction10
retrieval10
vector-database10
java10
textual10
oas10
audio10
3d-models10
query-by-example10
vector-space10
column-store10
cifs10
3d10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
vitrivr/vitrivr-engine
Nov 2023 - Aug 2025
vitrivr's next-generation retrieval engine. It is capable of extracting and retrieving a wider range of multimedia objects such as audio, video, images or 3d models.
Contributions:67 reviews, 31 PRs, 397 pushes in 1 year 9 months
3d-modelsaudiofeature-extractionmultimediamultimedia-retrieval
vitrivr/cottontaildb
Dec 2018 - Jan 2023
Cottontail DB is a column store vector database aimed at multimedia retrieval. It allows for classical boolean as well as vector-space retrieval (nearest neighbour search) used in similarity search using a unified data and query model.
Contributions:17 reviews, 1814 commits, 53 PRs in 4 years 1 month
column-storesimilarity-searchvector-databasevector-spacemultimedia
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