Jan Heinrich Merker's Awesome GeoCities Page!

Curriculum Vitae

Jan Heinrich Merker, M.Sc.

TL;DR: I'm currently pursuing my PhD on building better search engines for health-related topics.

I have been working as a researcher for 5 years and as a software developer for 7 years.

I support open source with 110 repos and 3025 stars on GitHub, often for Python, Kotlin, and Java.

I was awarded the Deutschlandstipendium and won multiple awards at top conferences.

I'm fluent in English and German, and I like to code, design, and engineer stuff.

Summary

Name	Jan Heinrich Merker
Address	Hohestieg 123 38118 Braunschweig Deutschland
Birthday	January 25, 1998
E-mail	[email protected]
Phone	+49 174 9273954

Education

05/2023 - today	Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena PhD Computer Science (ongoing)
04/2020 - 04/2023	Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg M.Sc. Computer Science, Ø 1.5 Thesis: Identifying and Answering Health-Related Questions
10/2016 - 07/2020	Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg B.Sc. Computer Science, Ø 1.7 Thesis: Bias in Learning to Rank Caused by Redundant Web Documents
08/2008 - 06/2016	Wilhelm-Gymnasium Braunschweig Abitur, Ø 1.7

Publications

07/2025	T. Hagen, M. Fröbe, J. H. Merker, H. Scells, M. Hagen, M. Potthast. TIREx Tracker: The Information Retrieval Experiment Tracker. In SIGIR 2025. ACM.
04/2025	A. Parry, J. H. Merker, S. Ruth, M. Fröbe, H. Scells. Corpora Performance Prediction. In QPP++ 2025.
04/2025	J. H. Merker, J. Bevendorff, M. Fröbe, T. Hagen, H. Scells, M. Wiegmann, B. Stein, M. Hagen, M. Potthast. Web-scale Retrieval Experimentation with chatnoir-pyterrier. In ECIR 2025. 96–104. Springer.
11/2024	M. Fröbe, L. Gienapp, J. H. Merker, H. Scells, E. O. Schmidt, M. Wiegmann, M. Potthast, M. Hagen. Webis at TREC 2024: Biomedical Generative Retrieval, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and Tip-of-the-Tongue Tracks. In TREC 2024. NIST.
10/2024	M. Fröbe, C. Akiki, T. Breuer, T. Eckart, A. Friedrich, L. Gienapp, J. H. Merker, M. Potthast, H. Scells, P. Schaer, B. Stein. Teaching Information Retrieval with a Shared Task Across Universities: First Steps and Findings. In LWDA 2024. Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.
09/2024	J. H. Merker, L. Merker, A. Bondarenko. The Impact of Web Search Result Quality on Decision Making. In CLEF 2024. 100–112. Springer.
09/2024	M. Gründel, M. Weber, J. Franke, J. H. Merker. Team Galápagos Tortoise at LongEval 2024: Neural Re-Ranking and Rank Fusion for Temporal Stability. In CLEF 2024. 2384–2395. CEUR-WS.org.
09/2024	J. H. Merker, A. Bondarenko, M. Hagen, A. Viehweger. MiBi at BioASQ 2024: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Answering Biomedical Questions. In CLEF 2024. 176–187. CEUR-WS.org.
08/2024	A. Bondarenko, M. Fröbe, D. Hollatz, J. H. Merker, M. Hagen. DeepCT-enhanced Lexical Argument Retrieval. In ArgMining 2024. 29–35. ACL.
08/2024	M. Fröbe, J. H. Reimer, S. MacAvaney, N. Deckers, J. Bevendorff, B. Stein, M. Hagen, M. Potthast. The Information Retrieval Experiment Platform (Extended Abstract). In IJCAI 2024. 8405–8410. IJCAI.
07/2024	M. Fröbe, H. Scells, T. Elstner, C. Akiki, L. Gienapp, J. H. Reimer, S. MacAvaney, B. Stein, M. Hagen, M. Potthast. Resources for Combining Teaching and Research in Information Retrieval Coursework. In SIGIR 2024. 1115–1125. ACM.
03/2024	M. Wiegmann, J. H. Reimer, M. Ernst, M. Potthast, M. Hagen, B. Stein. A Mastodon Corpus to Evaluate Federated Microblog Search. In WOWS 2024. 37-49. CEUR.ws.
12/2023	J. H. Reimer, A. Bondarenko, M. Fröbe, M. Hagen. Stance-Aware Re-Ranking for Non-factual Comparative Queries. In ArgMining 2023. 45–51. ACL.
10/2023	M. Fröbe, J. H. Reimer, S. MacAvaney, N. Deckers, J. Bevendorff, B. Stein, M. Hagen, M. Potthast. The Information Retrieval Experiment Platform (Extended Abstract). In LWDA 2023. 179–191. CEUR-WS.org.
09/2023	A. Bondarenko, M. Fröbe, J. Kiesel, F. Schlatt, V. Barriere, B. Ravenet, L. Hemamou, S. Luck, J. H. Reimer, B. Stein, M. Potthast, M. Hagen. Overview of Touché 2023: Argument and Causal Retrieval. In CLEF 2023. 507–530. Springer.
07/2023	M. Fröbe, J. H. Reimer, S. MacAvaney, N. Deckers, S. Reich, J. Bevendorff, B. Stein, M. Hagen, M. Potthast. The Information Retrieval Experiment Platform. In SIGIR 2023. 2826–2836. ACM.
07/2023	J. H. Reimer, S. Schmidt, M. Fröbe, L. Gienapp, H. Scells, B. Stein, M. Hagen, M. Potthast. The Archive Query Log: Mining Millions of Search Result Pages of Hundreds of Search Engines from 25 Years of Web Archives. In SIGIR 2023. 2848–2860. ACM.
11/2022	A. Bondarenko, M. Fröbe, L. Gienapp, A. Pugachev, J. H. Reimer, F. Schlatt, E. Artemova, M. Potthast, B. Stein, P. Braslavski, M. Hagen. Webis at TREC 2022: Deep Learning and Health Misinformation. In TREC 2022. NIST.
09/2022	J. H. Reimer, J. Huck, A. Bondarenko. Grimjack at Touché 2022: Axiomatic Re-ranking and Query Reformulation. In CLEF 2022. CEUR-WS.org.
07/2022	A. Bondarenko, M. Fröbe, J. H. Reimer, B. Stein, M. Völske, M. Hagen. Axiomatic Retrieval Experimentation with ir_axioms. In SIGIR 2022. 3131–3140. ACM.
11/2021	J. H. Reimer, T. K. H. Luu, M. Henze, Y. Ajjour. Modern Talking in Key Point Analysis: Key Point Matching using Pretrained Encoders. In ArgMining 2021. 175–183. ACL.
07/2020	M. Fröbe, J. Bevendorff, J. H. Reimer, M. Potthast, M. Hagen. Sampling Bias Due to Near-Duplicates in Learning to Rank. In SIGIR 2020. 1997–2000. ACM.

Experience

05/2023 - today	Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena Research associate Databases and Information Systems.
11/2017 - today	Reimer Software Self-employed full-stack software development.
10/2022 - 03/2023	Bauhaus-Universität Weimar Research assistant Media, Content Management, and Web Technology.
04/2022 - 09/2022	Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg Research assistant Big Data Analytics.
11/2021 - 04/2022	Bauhaus-Universität Weimar Research assistant Media, Content Management, and Web Technology.
04/2020 - 09/2021	Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg Research assistant Big Data Analytics.
02/2015 - 07/2019	Klasse! Wir singen – Singen e.V. Minijob event management and team leader.

Open-Source

02/2023	archive-query-log Jupyter Notebook, 28 stars, MIT The Archive Query Log.
12/2024	tirex-tracker C++, 4 stars, MIT Automatic resource and metadata tracking for IR experiments.
01/2022	chatnoir-pyterrier Python, 4 stars, MIT Use the ChatNoir search engine in PyTerrier.
02/2022	ir_axioms Python, 24 stars, 1 forks, MIT Intuitive axiomatic retrieval experimentation.
02/2016	material-intro Java, 1733 stars, 303 forks, MIT A simple material design app intro with cool animations and a fluent API.

Awards & Grants

09/2024	BioASQ Challenge Winner 100 EUR MiBi at BioASQ 2024: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Answering Biomedical Questions.
08/2023	ESSIR Student Registration Fee Waiver 400 EUR
07/2023	SIGIR Best Paper Award The Information Retrieval Experiment Platform. SIGIR 2023 Resource Paper.
07/2023	DAAD Kongressreisenprogramm 1.950 EUR The Archive Query Log. SIGIR 2023 Resource Paper.
10/2022	Deutschlandstipendium 2.100 EUR Joint scholarship from the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg and the German Government.
07/2022	CLEF Registration Fee Waiver 100 EUR Grimjack at Touché 2022: Axiomatic Re-ranking and Query Reformulation. CLEF 2022 Lab Paper.
04/2022	SIGIR Student Travel Grant 1.350 USD Axiomatic Retrieval Experimentation with ir_axioms. SIGIR 2022 Resource Paper.

Skills

Languages	German (native), English (fluent)
Code	Python, Kotlin, Java, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, TeX, Elasticsearch, Ray, Shell, HTML, CSS, SCSS, TypeScript, JavaScript, Android, SQL, C++, C, GraphQL, JSON, XML, Transformers, Jupyter, Pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, Spark, Hadoop, S3, Go, Vue, Elm, Julia, Haskell, PHP, Dart, Flutter, VS Code, IntelliJ
Design	UI, LaTeX, Material, Figma, app icons, kitchen construction, microcontrollers
Reviewer	SIGIR 2025, WOWS 2025, SIGIR 2024, WOWS 2024, Touché 2023

Social

Student's Council, Faculty Council

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