Prof. Dr. Thomas Hofmann

Thomas Hofmann has been full professor at ETH Zurich since April 2014. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bonn in 1997 and subsequently was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT (CBCL, AI Lab) and UC Berkeley (EECS, ICSI). He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1999 and was granted tenure in 2004. He moved to TU Darmstadt as a full professor and became Director of the IPSI Fraunhofer Institute. In 2006, he moved into the private sector and served as Director of Engineering at Google, joining the leadership of the Zurich R&D center. He quit Google in early 2014 to resume his academic career.  

In addition, Thomas has been active as an entrepreneur. He co-founded Recommind in 2000, a company that developed e-discovery solutions, which was acquired by OpenText in 2016. More recently he co-founded 1plusX, a Swiss company providing global marketing technology to publishers, media companies and marketers. He still is active at 1plusX as its Chief Scientist and member of the board.