about the owner
peter kühnlein was born and raised in nürnberg, germany, in 1961. his father being a physicist, he developed an early interest in everything technical. through his dad's job as developer in a large electronics company, he had contact with computers at the age of 10, which was highly unusual back in the 70s. his mother being an excellent cook he started to have an early interest in cooking just the same. also through his parents and their inclination towards kurosawa movies he became interested in other cultures. he attended highschool until the age of 17 when he quitted it to leave germany for a trip to the middle east.
- magazine
upon return, peter took up a job as electronics technician in a global company. he held that position for eight years, being elected member of the board of representatives after two years in addition to being in electronics q/a. the duty as a representative was the incentive for starting to learn spanish and turkish, with the largest populations of migrant colleagues speaking these languages natively. peter became interested in photography and creative writing. together with friends, he published a literary magazine, which, however turned out to be a financial desaster. only one edition appeared. he played the bass guitar in a number of local bands, with one of which he had a radio appearance. this was the time when he developed his first in-depth design skills and deepened his interest in architecture. the group of friends ran a movie theater (with peter's specialization being japanese movies) and the first new wave bar within 100 miles.
- eca max
peter quitted the position as electronics technician and went to highschool on a public grant. he was elected speaker for the students at school; his main subjects were mathematics, latin, sociology and philosophy, and he graduated from school as second best of the year. he started studying philosophy, germanic linguistics and psychology in erlangen, but it was clear from the outset that the restriction to germanic linguistics wasn't the right thing. he attended classes in computational linguistics and acquired some basic knowledge of arabic, and after one term moved to bielefeld, where he changed germanic linguistics for computational linguistics. unfortunately, it wasn't possible to continue with his studies of arabic, and peter switched to learning japanese instead. his main subject being philosophy, and with the focus on analytic philosophy in bielefeld, peter developed strong skills in logic. after one year he was given a position as student staff, mentoring other students. he held a number of such positions and after while joined a special research center developing artificial communicators. he learned how to write programs in prolog and developed a shift-reduce parser for short stretches of discourse that rendered the input as discourse representation structures.
in the project, peter worked with computer scientists and linguists on developing advanced user interfaces, so-called embodied conversational agents. he was also responsible for the maintenance of the information technology infrastructure and websites of his working group during this time; here, he acquired deep knowledge of linux and unix operating systems, server maintenance, perl and php scripting, (x)html and css. peter graduated from his studies with best marks and was offered a position as researcher in the research center. years filled with research and international travelling followed.
- zeche zollern
the position as a researcher also offered the opportunity to teach classes, which he did during all of the academic career in bielefeld. the focus of his research was on communications theory, and he co-organized a number of workshops on that topic.
peter married a colleague from the university who soon after got a position in the nearby city of dortmund. she shared a number of interests with him, not only in linguistics, but also in photography. together they started extensive documentation about the ruhr valley using pentacon medium format cameras and doing all the chemical processing. through his wife, he also was in the position to teach at the university of dortmund and he held a temporary position there. after separation, he went back to bielefeld, where he still had his research position.
meanwhile, peter had been elected member of the board of representatives of the scientific staff there, and was responsible for counselling the board in questions of information technology. he became expert in data safety and security and was part of the consultations on an identity management system that was to be put into place. his responsibilities included the public relations work, maintaining the web site of the board of representatives and acting as emissary to the meetings of the country wide boards. he became chair of the board.
- groningen
peter was offered a position at the university of groningen as a researcher. the project description sounded interesting and he accepted. he gave lectures on computational theory of discourse in an artificial intelligence class besides his research project. however, it turned out that the project management was disappointing and it was agreed that the project should be abandoned prematurely. on the positive side, during the stay in the netherlands, a number of pictures of the beautiful northern shore region were made.
after returning to germany from the netherlands, peter decided to found function2form and thus finally bring his interests in communication, design and technology together.
- the bike
in his spare time, peter enjoys riding his bike and going for hikes as well as going to the movie theaters. whenever something has to be repaired at his classic bmw, he does that by himself being enthusiastic about the functioning of mechanics. nevertheless, he still is working on scientific publications and currently two books are about to be published.
quote of the day
(Hagakure)