About Us

autstat 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 well-known statconn family of products.

With more than 15 years of experience in automation, autstat provides ground-breaking advances in Automation, just as has been done for statistics for the past decade.

The formation of autstat as now presents soltuions to a wider audience.

 

The masterminds behind autstat and its products are:

  • Thomas Baier
  • Erich Neuwirth

autstat offices are located in the hearts of Austrian wine regions:

  • Krems an der Donau, Austria's white wine capital and
  • Bad Vöslau, Austria's red wine capital

Fortunately, not only software is exchanged between these two regions...

Thomas Baier, born in 1971, holds a master's degree in Computer Science from Vienna University of Technology. Since 1996 he has been working in the automation business and has been responsible for PLC development since 1998.

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.

One of his projects, statconnDCOM (formerly R (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.

Thomas is IEC expert for Austria and is actively working on the definition of various standards, e.g., IEC 61131 (PLC programming), IEC 62714 (Automation ML).

Recently he has been working with MicroSys, a leading manufacturer of PowerPC based hardware located near Munich and is involved with various safety-related projects.

Erich Neuwirth, born in 1948, is professor emeritus 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.

Katie Ruzicka, born in 1979, is responsible for quality assurance of autstat automation products. Currently she is also managing the back-office for autstat.