Our Team

Management of the institute

Details refer to the heading “The Founder of the institute”

Archeology Dr. Oskar Kaelin (*1968), Research Fellow at the University Basel is working on the project Sources for the history of the Phenicians (Quellen zur Geschichte der Phönizier) with its cuneiform texts. He is Associate Editor in the project Iconography of Deities and Demons in the Ancient Near East (Zürich/Fribourg). From 2012 to 2017 he organised and edited the 9th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (ICAANE) at the University of Basel. Before, he participated in projects such as: „Creation of a Corpus of Palestinian and Israel stamp seals” (Fribourg), “Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Egyptian Language” (Basel) and “Creation of a Sumerian Glossary” (Berne). He participated in various expositions in Switzerland and took part in archaeological excavations in Syria, Oman and Switzerland.

Scientific Consultant Roger W. Ehrich is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He specializes in computer vision and from 1985 to 1987 was Director of the Spatial Data Analysis Laboratory at Virginia Tech and institute director for the Virginia Center for Innovative Technology. More recently he was a founding member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction in Computer Science. He taught courses in computer graphics, digital image processing, and data compression. He has been a consultant to ICRA since 1984 and supervised the technical design of OEBSYS.

Consultant Finance Technology Peter Heister has been working for over 25 years in international finance. He has a profound experience and know-how in the European finance market. Peter enjoys a considerable network of clients, partners throughout the European industry. He has held strategic management positions in such organisations as Deutsche Bank, Smarthouse Media, Interactive Data, Thomson Reuters, Thomson, Oracle, etc. As a founding member and manager of the MiFiD working group in Germany (2006 – 2008) he participated also in the projects of other European working groups. His expertise today encompasses digital transformation, financial consulting, blockchain and other new technologies. Peter holds a degree in IT with a Master in organisation and work psychology. He consults for different companies and fintechs in business development, strategic management, digitization, robo advice, as well as blockchain and production strategies for the European market.

Software Design Consultant Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI); B.S. in accounting; concentration in computer science; former President of Business Software Solutions, Christiansburg, VA. Three years research in image processing under Prof. Dr. Ehrich at VPI, with work on image processing systems, such as GIPSY (General Image Processing System). Vice President ICRA, Inc. for research and development since 1988. Responsible for technology developments and implementations of projects within the company. His contributions range from superior programming expertise in modern environments to design of very complex systems and project management for large projects within ICRA, Inc. During his tenure at ICRA, Michael Wade worked on early machine vision systems for inspecting printed circuitry (OEBSYS), printing on CD's and other surfaces as well as the fully automated inspection of ball bearing surfaces for defects. Additionally, ICRA worked on document and information management systems for several large corporations, such as Nestle, Darier Hentsch and others. Since that time he has focused his work on information management in the US Legal industry with a recent focus on using Machine Learning to augment the management of contracts and other structured information source for purposes of compliance, risk management and legal discovery.

Since 2015 self-employed as management consultant and owner of „Thomas Hentrich – company consulting“. At present, business coach within projects for the European Commission. During the previous 40 years, he held leading positions with Deutsche Telekom AG as engineer for communication technology in national and international projects. First contacts with ICRA were established at CeBIT 1992 (Hannover). Their expertise and technology competence in the areas of data transmission, data compression and encryption technologies as well as search algorithms were outstanding. These features were applied in subsequent years within joint projects of ICRA and Deutsche Telekom AG. An example of this collaboration was the error-free transmission of the digitized movie “Toy Story 2” over two ISDN basic transmission lines between Hamburg and Munich; also, the connection from Munich to Alterswil via the German Telekom satellite DFS coupled with a video conference and full text retrieval in a database in Alterswil constituted a milestone in digital communication at its time. In recent times, the application of the ICRA technology in a satellite project with the University Stuttgart, Institute for Space Systems with funding of the European Commission is being discussed.