Hubert Mara

Hubert Mara is an Austrian Computer Scientist who specializes in Archaeoinformatics and the application of methods from computer science to the humanities, and thus a combination of these fields.

Education and career

Hubert Mara graduated (matura) in electrical engineering from the HTBLuVA in Wiener Neustadt and studied computer science at the TU Wien, graduating in 2006. Already during his studies he participated in excavations in Israel and Peru, where he learned to combine methods of computer science and humanities. Early on, he participated in the development of new methods here, such as for 3D recording of ancient pottery for the Austrian Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. After graduation, he received a Marie Curie Fellowship, with the help of which he went to the University of Florence, where he joined the Cultural Heritage Informatics Research Oriented Network (CHIRON) was involved in the development of the London Charter for the Computational Visualization of Cultural Heritage.

In 2009, Mara moved to the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) at the Universität Heidelberg. In Heidelberg, his interdisciplinary doctorate was awarded in 2012, with Willi Jäger and Hans Georg Bock as reviewers. As part of the dissertation, he developed the GigaMesh Software Framework. This was a free and open source modular software for displaying, editing and visualizing 3D data. In practice, it is used to make things visible again that can no longer be captured with the normal human eye. Thus, it was now possible to make the writing on weathered gravestones legible again, The group was dedicated to further projects on 3D computer vision, but also machine learning for archaeological finds. In 2014, he was offered a professorship at the University of Cologne without tenure track, which he declined. Since 1. November 2021, Mara is a tenure-track-junior professor of eHumanities at the Institute of Computer Science at University of Halle. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the it - Information Technology journal series at De Gruyter,