Dirk Thomas holds a PhD degree in Computer Science and currently works as a Software Engineer at the Open Source Robotics Foundation - a non-profit company in the Silicon Valley which among others develops the software ROS (Robot Operating System). Before that he worked in the same domain as a Research Engineer at Willow Garage. Dirk focuses on efficient middlware design and software architectures especially in the context of autonomous mobile robots.
He studied in the Simulation, Systems Optimization and Robotics Group at TU Darmstadt, Germany. In the context of the RoboCup he won the world championship multiple times - with the four-legged Aibo-Robots of the Darmstadt Dribbling Dackels as well as with the two-legged humanoids of the Darmstadt Dribblers.
During his studies and doctoral research Dirk Thomas was a co-founder of 4wd media. Besides his duties as a managing partner he was specialized to the development of complex web appliances in PHP as well as applications using Adobe Flex.
In his spare time Dirk maintained the Open-Source project WebSVN - a PHP application to browse Subversion repositories online.