Who am I

(click for an enlargement) Curriculum Vitae / Lebenslauf (requires password) Name: Steffen Olf Beyer Birth: Born on January 3rd 1964 in Backnang, Baden-Württemberg, Germany In 1969 my parents and I moved to Brussels, Belgium which is where I went to a (french-spoken) Kindergarten and learned French in Brussels I also learned a little bit of Dutch (later on) School: 1970-1983 Deutsche Schule Brüssel (German School of Brussels) where I was very lucky to have a truly outstanding teacher and very remarkable person, Mr. Alan Broome, in English Studies: 1983-1993 Computer Science and Biology at the RWTH Aachen (University of Aachen) which is also where I learned Spanish and Portuguese Special thanks go to my mentor, Prof. Dr. W. Oberschelp (Lehrstuhl für Angewandte Mathematik insbesondere Informatik) Travel abroad: 3 months to the USA in 1989 in two trips, many many trips to Brazil in 1990, 1994/95, 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000/01 (see also my foto gallery) as well as many trips in Europe, especially to Spain and Portugal Afflicted with Hashimoto Thyreoiditis and a Prolactinoma (Pituitary Adenoma) at least since 1996 Interesting articles: Dr. Steven Hotze vs. the Endocrinologists: The Battle Over Hypothyroidism Diagnosis and Armour Thyroid An Interview with John Dommisse, MD (Unique Theories About Hypothyroidism Treatment) Prof. Romijn: Intrinsic imperfections of endocrine replacement therapy (click on "[Begin manual download]") Gail Wurmstein's Thyroid Tips, in particular about the adrenal-thyroid connection Sign the Petition for a better treatment of hypothyroidism and have a look at the complete List of signatures Some resources: Hashimoto Thyreoiditis (German) Morbus Basedow (= Graves' Disease, German) German Forum German Forum Prof. Hotze Dutch Forum French Forum Susanne's Thyroid Info Homepage (Trilingual) Mary Shomon's Thyroid Info Homepage HashimotoThyreoiditis - Trilingual Info for Unbelievers Matrix of Signs and Symptoms: Adrenal Fatigue vs. Low Thyroid Function Hypophysenerkrankungen - Ein Patientenratgeber (PDF, German) Erkrankungen der Hypophyse und der Nebennieren (PDF, German) Skript Endokrinologie (PDF, German) Steroid Hormone Pathways Adrenal response to chronic stress (graphics) Ben's Arztliste & Ben's Website & Hertoghe-Docs (German) Hormontherapie Prof. Hotze (German) Lab Values Explained A-Z (German) Part of hackerdom (somehow involuntarily and unaware of the fact ;-)) since 1979 (Programmable pocket calculators TI-57 and TI-59, Apple ][+ with CP/M and Turbo Pascal, lots of programming in machine code (in hexadecimal) and assembler (6502, 6805, Z80), development of devices for industrial robots at the Werkzeugmaschinenlabor Aachen (WZL), research in Neural Networks at the Neurolinguistics Department of the Klinikum der RWTH Aachen, and more) Diploma Thesis (1992) In my diploma thesis [895k] (unfortunately in German only - see also this directory of individual files or download it all at once [483k]) I implemented several algorithms for "supervised learning" of "backpropagation" neural networks (see the simulation program [118k] written in VAX Pascal - fortunately in English), which were taken from literature, and compared their performance in a benchmark. To make a long story short, Schmidhuber's algorithm for searching zeroes of the error function (instead of local minima like the other algorithms), by a kind of Newton approximation, was by far the best, especially when combined with random presentation of patterns with a selection probability proportional to their error (i.e., the measure of deviation from the expected output), an invention of mine (from a vocabulary training program I had written for myself when I was learning Spanish at the university). Another huge advantage of this algorithm is that it is free of parameters.