Thijs Chanowski

Vocation

Dutch television producer, entrepreneur and researcher. Chanowski began his career in the fields of jazz music and painting. He was the producer of the first ten episodes of the children's program "de Fabeltjeskrant" (The Fable), earning him the nickname Thijs "Mr. Owl" Chanowski. Later, he produced 250 episodes of "Paulus de Boskabouter" and other television series and movies. For one of those films, "Camping," he won the prestigious Prix d'Italia. He also worked from 1972 as a consultant with Philips to develop the world's first interactive laser disc. After winning several awards for film and television productions, in which new technologies were applied, Chanowski decided to focus entirely on the development of interactive environments, since making significant contributions to search processing technologies, design programs for multimedia database systems, and also advanced simulation technology for the European Space Programme. In 1990, Chanowski founded a multimedia lab which focuses on "knowledge mining". This company developed an "intuitive" search engine that works with term association instead of word matches. Chanowski remained director when the company was acquired by software company BSO as "BSO Media Lab." He later bought back the company. Link to Wikipedia biography (Dutch)