Sascha Brawer

Method for Memory-Bounded Construction of a Globally Complete, High-Zoom-Level Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF from Tile-Access Logs

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A defensive disclosure of the technique behind OSMViews: how its builder turns a rolling window of OpenStreetMap tile-access logs into a planet-wide raster in constant memory. Published to prevent patentability; the reference implementation is on GitHub under the MIT license.

Bühlstrasse

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had never painted a night scene, so one evening I went out to try, right around the corner from my apartment in Bern, at the intersection with Bühlstrasse.

Bern’s streetlights today are plain cool-white LEDs. Before painting, I therefore tinted the photo yellow myself to mimic the warm light of the sodium-vapor lamps that were common in the 1970s. I just liked the effect: everything appears in a strangely saturated orange; headlights blur into streaks; a storefront disappears into the shadows; a passerby crosses the scene right in the middle of this light. For me, color is the central element in this painting—even though the street doesn’t look anything like that anymore.

Orchid

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I like flowers, but as a subject to paint I find people much more interesting. But my mother-in-law loves flowers, and she loves the color white — so for her birthday I painted a white orchid, in oil.

Prime Tower

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One evening I was walking from Zürich Hardbrücke station over to Bitwäscherei, a hackerspace, for a Swiss OpenStreetMap get-together. I was a little early, so I stopped on the bridge and stood there for a while, letting my eyes drift across the skyline. They lingered on the glass facade of Prime Tower — for a few years Switzerland’s tallest building, and about as tidy a symbol of Zürich’s prosperity as you could ask for. Its sleek, expensive panes reflected the red-and-white chimney of the waste-incineration plant next door, and the fluorescent tubes lighting the office floors cut long bright lines through the whole picture. This contrast and the geometric shapes fascinated me.

Automated Georeferencing of Archived Cadastral Plans

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An independent project, presented to the City of Zürich’s Geomatics and Surveying department. The talk was given in German.

Paranoid Parrot

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This painting joins my Memes series — internet memes reimagined in oil.

Paranoid Parrot is the go-to reaction image for that special 3 a.m. thought spiral: a coworker says “sounds good” instead of “sounds great,” and within four seconds you’ve reconstructed an entire conspiracy against you.

What I’m genuinely proud of here is the beak, built up the traditional way: fat over lean, each layer a touch oilier than the last, so the paint stays flexible instead of cracking apart.

Overly Attached Girlfriend

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This one joins my Memes series — internet memes reimagined in oil.

Overly Attached Girlfriend is built around one unblinking stare into the camera, captioned with lines that turn ordinary affection into something a few notches past healthy. I’ll admit I never quite got the joke, though: if anything, I think people should care more about each other, not less. Sure, there’s a line where caring tips into something else — but crossing that line isn’t funny either, just concerning. So the whole subtext of this meme is honestly lost on me.

Success Kid

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This one joins my Memes series — internet memes reimagined in oil.

Success Kid started life as a 2007 snapshot of a toddler on a beach, fist clenched, looking improbably pleased with himself — it went on to caption a decade of online “mission accomplished” moments.

People react to this painting in two very different ways: some see a cute, determined little kid; others feel a bit uneasy, reading the clenched fist as a stand-in for toxic masculinity. I’m firmly in the second camp. Painting is usually meditative for me — I rarely feel much of anything while I work. This one was the exception: I had a genuine, negative reaction to the image, and it stuck with me the whole time I was painting it.

Disaster Girl

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This one joins my Memes series — internet memes reimagined in oil.

Disaster Girl is the 2005 photo of a young girl smirking in front of a burning house, endlessly recaptioned to place her calmly watching over one disaster or another — one of the internet’s most recognizable memes.

I painted this one mainly as an exercise in older oil techniques I hadn’t tried before — hair, skin tones, and smoke each behave very differently on canvas, and I wanted to get a feel for all three at once. The eyes gave me more trouble than I expected, and I can already see where I’d do them differently now. But I’m genuinely happy with the skin: building it up through several thin, semi-transparent layers, the way older paintings often were made, gives it a subtle shimmer that a single opaque layer just can’t produce. Still plenty to learn, but this one taught me a lot.

Mittelstrasse

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is Gelateria di Berna, an ice cream parlor on Mittelstrasse in Bern, a few minutes’ walk from my apartment. I painted it on a bright summer day — the kind when every table outside is taken and the line spills onto the sidewalk.

What I find interesting is the wall on the right. In reality it carries a big piece of graffiti. At first glance it looks quickly sprayed on, but it is so carefully done that it is almost certainly a commissioned work. I copied it line for line. In oil — an even slower medium — it came out a touch more precise than the original itself. That friction between an everyday format and a gallery medium is the whole point of my Memes series — this isn’t a meme, obviously, but apparently I can’t resist chasing the same clash everywhere.

Anti-Joke Chicken

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This one joins my Memes series — internet memes reimagined in oil.

The Anti-Joke Chicken is an image macro built around a chicken photographed mid-stare, used to caption jokes that set up a punchline and then deliberately refuse to deliver one. Instead you get the flat, literal, faintly deadpan answer — the format traces back to the oldest anti-joke there is: “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.” No twist, no wordplay, just the obvious answer stated completely straight. That’s the whole joke — the anticlimax is the punchline.

Fùxīng Lù

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fùxīng Lù is a quiet street in Shanghai’s old French Concession, all plane trees and small shops, with a coffee shop every few doors. One of them had a big glass front, and the room behind it looked nice, so I took a photo through the window with my phone and walked on.

I didn’t look at it again for years. When I finally did, going through old travel pictures, one thing jumped out: the place was full, everyone packed in around tiny tables — and half of them were staring at a phone. So was I, technically. That’s how the photo got taken.

Budgie

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick ballpoint-pen drawing from one evening on the couch, half-listening to a podcast.

Waldrapp

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have a soft spot for strange-looking animals — the uglier the better — and the Waldrapp, or northern bald ibis, is a prize specimen: a bald, wrinkled head, a shaggy ruff, a long curved beak. This one went fast.

Schaffhauserstrasse

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After meeting a friend in Zürich one afternoon, I was walking back toward the station when I passed Kafi Freud on Schaffhauserstrasse. People were sitting outside in a bright wedge of sun, coffee cups on the little tables, and the whole scene had a warm, easy glow to it. I took a photo from across the street and painted it later.

I ended up cropping the faces out of the frame. To me that makes the picture more interesting — you still get the leaning-in, the gestures, the shape of a good conversation, without needing to know whose it is. I might turn it into a series one day: faceless people, chatting over coffee.

Are you a human?

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Like everyone else, I spend an embarrassing amount of my life proving to websites that I’m not a robot. Websites are machines too, but they refuse to send their bytes to the machine sitting in front of my eyeballs — unless I click on enough traffic lights first. Normally that’s just background annoyance. One day, I actually looked at the images — and found them wonderfully bad: blurry, oddly tilted little photos, snapped, it turns out, by an actual Street View car having a rough day.

Shinjuku-eki

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On Unsplash I found a freely licensed photograph by Eutah Mizushima: a woman waiting on a subway platform, with a blurred background. It looked like a good opportunity to learn how to fake motion blur in oil.

I painted with two different whites — zinc white, cool and slightly gray, for the hazy background, and titanium white, warmed up with a touch of chromium yellow, for her pullover in the foreground. The photo was taken at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, which gave me the title: “Shinjuku-eki”, Japanese for “Shinjuku Station”.

Golden Retriever

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This piece began as an exercise in my painting class — I wanted to learn how to paint fur that actually looks soft, and a dog felt like the perfect challenge. My godchild Flurina has a golden retriever, so the choice made itself. I gave it to her as a birthday present, and she loved it.

Woman in a Leather Jacket

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After experimenting with tools in oil — I liked the technique a lot, but found the subject deadly dull — it dawned on me: people are far more interesting. I’m generally fascinated by 1920s art, especially New Objectivity, and wanted to try a portrait in that style.

In an exhibition, I had seen Lady in Fur, a 1925 painting by Wilhelm Lachnit. I didn’t want to paint an exact copy, though — I wondered instead how she might look today. I don’t know much about the woman herself, but she was plausibly a flapper, to use the English term for the Weimar Republic’s modern, liberated women.

Anna Gabbioneta, after Christian Schad

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A study after Christian Schad’s Anna Gabbioneta (1927), made as a technical exercise.

Fuse

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks after Pliers, I painted a similar subject — a fuse, because it gave me metal and glass in one image. I wanted to practice different metal effects, so I gave the two end caps different finishes: one duller and matte, the other brighter and more reflective.

What I loved was how easily oil let me try out things. It is so much more forgiving than watercolor, where a misjudged stroke is often a misjudged stroke for good — with oil you can rework a passage, change your mind, and try a different technique right next to the last one, and the paint just goes along with it.

Pliers

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This was my very first oil painting. I just wanted to learn the technique, so I went looking for an easy subject — a pair of pliers. I have no interest in tools; I chose this one purely because it looked easy to paint.

What did interest me was the contrast between subject and medium. Oil paint is soft and forgiving — you can blend it, push it around, take your time with it — and I wanted to see whether that same softness could still produce something as hard-edged and precise as a metal tool. Figuring out how to make paint look sharp turned out to be a much better lesson than I expected from such a modest subject. I had no idea at the time that I was about to get hooked.

Using Variable Font Width to Adjust Flow of Text Within Text Boxes

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Published on Technical Disclosure Commons to prevent patentability, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Text Rendering Tests

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Unicode’s test suite for text rendering engines

Quick Transitions Between Indoor and Outdoor Maps

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From the indoor-mapping work on Google Maps.

Map Content Driven by Location and Schedule

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A location- and schedule-aware Google Maps feature. The German entry is a utility model (Gebrauchsmuster), which runs a shorter term than the patents.

Building Exteriors from Interior Floor Plans

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From the indoor-mapping work on Google Maps — deriving a building’s outside from its floor plans.

Estimating the Cost of Workplace Activities

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A patent application filed by Google in 2011 and published in 2015, but not pursued to grant. The publication put the method into the public record; because no patent ever issued, it is free for anyone to use.

Proper Name Transcription/Transliteration with ICU Transforms

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This was a talk rather than a published paper — slides and a recording of the presentation, no separate written paper. Presented at IUC 34 in Santa Clara.

Conversion of Input Text Strings

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Patented technology for converting place names and similar geographic strings between writing systems — part of the same line of work as the ICU transforms talk.

ISO 19137:2007 — Geographic Information — Core Profile of the Spatial Schema

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was the editor and principal author, and took the standard through ISO/TC 211’s process. It grew out of a background paper I wrote for Working Group 7 on aligning commonly used spatial formats with ISO 19107. Available from the ISO catalogue.

Mobile Sitemaps

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A mobile-web extension of the Sitemaps protocol. Granted in the United States, Japan, China and South Korea; the Canadian and Brazilian filings were not pursued to grant.

Sitemaps for Web Crawling

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The patents behind the Sitemaps protocol, co-developed at Google in 2005 and published openly as an industry standard — two US continuation threads, one for the website side and one for the crawler side.

Java Security: How Free Software Is Secured Using the Java Language

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Given with the GNU Classpath team at FOSDEM 2004 in Brussels. See also the companion talk GNU Classpath: Core Classes for a Diversity of Java Virtual Machines.

GNU Classpath: Core Classes for a Diversity of Java Virtual Machines

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Given with Mark Wielaard at LOTS 2004 in Bern and in the Java Developer Room at FOSDEM 2004. The companion talk on the platform’s security model: Java Security.

The Open-Source and Free-Software Scene in Switzerland

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A German-language talk, given with Dietrich Feist for Wilhelm Tux, the Swiss free-software campaign, at LOTS 2004 in Bern.

Multi-Dimensional Foraging and Retrieval of Documents

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Developed at Xerox PARC, in the same line of research as the interactive classification patent.

Modeling Spatial Data

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Co-authored with Joseph Dorfschmid, commissioned by KOGIS/swisstopo. The textbook was written and published in German for a German-speaking audience — the PDF linked here is the original German text, not a translation. It alternates between the narrated Ilistal story and the underlying theory, so readers can go as deep as their interest and prior knowledge call for.

Current NSDI Activities in Switzerland Based on ISO 19100 Standards

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Presented by the Swiss delegation at the ISO/TC 211 plenary in Bangkok, with Hans-Rudolf Gnägi (ETH Zürich) and Claude Eisenhut (Eisenhut Informatik). I was at Adasys AG, Zürich, at the time.

Interactive Classification of Objects

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Developed at Xerox PARC, in the same line of research as the multi-dimensional document foraging patent.

Colors in INTERLIS 2

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Written at Adasys AG, Zürich, for the Swiss Federal Office of Topography, Directorate of Cadastral Surveying.

Patti

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Given on a 1999 tour of several research labs. The full write-up is my diploma thesis, Patti.

An Architecture for Content Analysis of Documents and its Use in Information and Knowledge Management Tasks

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From the natural-language research program at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in Cupertino.

Dynamic Presentation of Document Content for Rapid On-Line Skimming

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From the SeeFacts document-skimming project at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in Cupertino.

Patti

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My diploma thesis at Saarland University, supervised by Hans Uszkoreit and Manfred Pinkal. It describes work I did during an internship at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in Cupertino.

A talk on the core ideas followed in 1999.

Programming Techniques in Computational Linguistics

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

University of Zurich, Department of Informatics, Computational Linguistics — winter semester 1997/98 through summer semester 1999.

I designed this course from scratch. Prolog wouldn’t necessarily have been my first choice for it — I’m a systems programmer at heart — but the department insisted I teach exactly this language. It looks fairly odd from today’s vantage point, but back in the 1990s, Prolog, together with Lisp, was the language of choice in artificial intelligence.

Montague’s Semantic Model in “English as a Formal Language”

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Written up from a talk I gave on 18 January 1995 in Werner Saurer’s Montague Grammar seminar at Saarland University. Slides.

Treating German with a Provably Context-Free Grammar

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A condensed English version of the German original, Mechanismen einer kontextfreien Grammatik für das Deutsche, which first appeared in the student track of the 18th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI-94). This version was presented at the 5th Conference of Computational Linguistics Students (TaCoS) in Saarbrücken.

The work describes the grammar and parser of the SVOX text-to-speech system, developed by the Speech Processing Group at ETH Zürich, where I spent three months in 1993 reworking both.

Computational Lexicology

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A German-language write-up of a talk from B. Zimmermann’s introductory Lexikon seminar at Saarland University.

Imprint

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sascha Brawer, Länggassstrasse 27, 3012 Bern, Switzerland

Email: sascha@brawer.ch

UID: CHE-484.325.065

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Résumé

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

See Publications for a full list of papers, talks, and patents.