About Us

statconn combines the talents of contributors with different experiences and backgrounds. Their common interest in embedding powerful statistical tools in everyday applications has lead to fruitful cooperation and the formation of statconn as a means to present their work to a wider audience.

The masterminds behind statconn are:

• Thomas Baier
• Erich Neuwirth

Thomas Baier, born in 1971, holds a master's degree in Computer Science from Vienna University of Technology. He has been working on and contributing to various open source projects since 1995, including e.g. GCC and Octave. Since 1998 he has been involved with R and his focus is connecting R with applications in heterogeneous environments. Currently, this includes connecting R and Scilab on various operating system and technology platforms.

Besides contributing to statconn, Thomas is R&D Manager for logi.cals, a software company based in the center of Lower Austria near Vienna. There, he is responsible for the development of software for mission critical applications and safety in industrial and process automation.

One of his projects, the R/Scilab (D)COM Server was started together with RExcel in 1998. Since then, hundreds of users in the academic and commercial worlds use his application successfully for teaching, research, and business. One of the major goals of the project is to provide industrial grade evolving software while still preserving compatibility going back even to the first version.

Erich Neuwirth, born in 1948, is associate professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Vienna. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Statistics.

He is a specialist in spreadsheets and has published extensively in this area. He is the principal author of RExcel, the statistics addin for Microsoft Excel. He has a very strong background in applied statistics, including extensive work in election night forecasting and voter transition analysis, ranging from theoretical work on the statistical models to having presented the election night forcasts live on national TV from 1986 to 1996. He has also worked with the international PISA study (a statistical comparison of student achievements in many countries). He has has served and serves as statistical consultants to a wide variety of clients, including the Austrian National Lottery, Casinos Austria, and various pharmaceutical companies.

His other activities include managing SunSITE Austria, a Web site dedicated to the support of teaching Computer Science, Mathematics, Science, and Statistics. A project about the mathematics of tuning musical instruments won the 1996 European Academic Software Award.

His collaboration on RExcel with Thomas Baier began in 1998.