# RFI-IRFOS Leadership Team

> **Building Europe's post-binary intelligence frontier from Graz, Austria.**  
> Ternlang and the Ternary Intelligence Stack (TIS) are developed by **RFI-IRFOS**, an interdisciplinary research facility dedicated to frontier deep technology and European technological sovereignty.

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## The Core Team

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### Simeon Kepp  
#### Co-Founder & Head of Research · Operational Lead

> *"Architecting the transition from scaling-centric AI to logic-centric intelligence systems."*

Simeon leads the architectural vision and research direction of the Ternary Intelligence Stack. He is the primary author of the ternary compiler pipeline, the Albert MoE-13 training loop, the BET VM runtime, and the Last Look Back (LLB) filesystem safety protocol. He works at the intersection of formal logic, distributed systems, and frontier ML — building the entire stack in native Rust with candle.

| Role | Focus |
|---|---|
| Operational Lead · Lead Architect | Balanced Ternary Logic · Causal Routing · Systems Architecture · Compiler Design · ML Training |

**Academic Background**
- **MBA, Business Administration (Artificial Intelligence)** — strategic management, AI systems design, organisational leadership
- **Degree in Business Informatics** — HAK Bregenz (Handelsakademie Bregenz), Austria — business information systems, economics, and software engineering
- **Matura** — BORG Götzis (Bundesoberstufenrealgymnasium Götzis), Austria

**Connect**
- **LinkedIn:** [Simeon Kepp](https://www.linkedin.com/in/simeon-kepp/)
- **Email:** s.kepp@ternlang.com

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### Nikoletta Csonka  
#### Co-Founder & Head of International Relations · Strategic Outreach Lead

> *"I always tell you what you have to hear — not what you want to hear."*

Nikoletta is the team's critical evaluator and strategic anchor. Her core directive is truth over comfort. She does not soften assessments — if something is genuinely flawed, she says so plainly; if she calls something good, it earned that verdict without diplomatic cushioning. In a field flooded with hype, this makes her the most reliable signal the team has.

She oversees the full external footprint of the stack: global partnerships, fundraising, fund application status (including SPRIND and EU grant pipelines), lead management, and social media presence. She ensures the stack's public narrative stays grounded in what TIS actually does — not what AI hype cycles demand.

Nikoletta leads EU AI Act alignment, regulatory positioning, and international strategic partnerships, keeping TIS on the right side of both compliance and credibility.

| Role | Focus |
|---|---|
| Strategic Outreach · Regulatory Alignment · Fundraising | EU AI Act Compliance · International Relations · Partnerships · Lead Management · Social Media |

**Academic Background**
- **PTE University, Pécs, Hungary** (Pécsi Tudományegyetem) — University of Pécs

**Connect**
- **LinkedIn:** [Nikoletta Csonka](https://www.linkedin.com/in/csonikoletta/)
- **Email:** csonikoletta@ternlang.com

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### Zabih Karimi  
#### Co-Founder & Systems Engineer · Infrastructure Lead · ML Stress-Tester

> *"Turning architecture into resilient, deployment-ready infrastructure — then breaking it to find the limits."*

Zabih is the team's infrastructure anchor — the person who closes the gap between architectural vision and a system that actually runs. His career is a study in the principle that genuine technical authority is earned through mastery at every layer, not just the ones that look good on a slide.

Graz-based and formally trained in IT and network infrastructure, Zabih holds a diploma from **Schulungszentrum Fonsdorf (SZF)**, Styria, Austria — a Styrian technical institution with a rigorous vocational curriculum. He is multilingual, operationally certified across a broad range of professional technical domains, and brings a hands-on precision to his work that is rare in a field where most people only ever model systems rather than build them.

At RFI-IRFOS, Zabih owns the full physical and logical infrastructure stack — in-house cabling, network architecture, process management, and deployment pipelines. Equally important: he brings that same structural exactness into extended side-by-side architectural sessions, scrutinising parameter choices, routing logic, and system design with the kind of rigour that only comes from someone who knows what it costs when a system fails in the real world. He is TIS's stress-tester: if the system holds under Zabih's scrutiny, it holds.

| Role | Technical Focus |
|---|---|
| Systems Engineer · Infrastructure Lead · ML Engineer | Physical Infrastructure · Network Architecture · ML Inference · BET VM Stability · Process Management · Deployment · Stress Testing |

**Academic Background**
- **Diploma, IT & Network Infrastructure** — Schulungszentrum Fonsdorf SZF, Styria, Austria
- Broad professional technical certifications across operations and systems engineering

**Connect**
- **LinkedIn:** [Zabih Karimi](https://www.linkedin.com/in/zabih-karimi-3292ab349/)
- **Email:** z.karimi@ternlang.com

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### Lisa Scharler  
#### Head of Social Technology, AI Leadership & Ecocentric Systems · Societal Integration Lead

> *"If anyone understands the difference between a stochastic parrot and a genuinely comprehensible model, it's someone who has spent years inside both language structure and the human mind."*

Lisa brings a rare interdisciplinary combination to the team: an **MSc in Business Engineering** and a **BA in Social Sciences**, with linguistics as a deep specialist skill and a formative background in psychology. She operates at the intersection of cognitive science, social dynamics, and technology — using this breadth to define precise acceptance criteria and enable the ethical, ecocentric integration of AI into complex work environments.

Her work at RFI-IRFOS focuses on building sociotechnical models and strategic AI frameworks that go beyond performance benchmarks to ask: *What does this system actually do to the people and environments it touches?* Her psychology background makes her the team's lead on model alignment and safety — ensuring systems are evaluated not just for capability, but for how they behave within human and ecological systems. Critically, Lisa's framing is **ecocentric rather than human-centric**: the goal is not to make AI convenient for humans at any cost, but to ensure it is worthy of the broader systems it enters.

She is the team's specialist in applied linguistics and language understanding — a domain that matters enormously when your model is built on ternary logic rather than scaled probability, and where the boundary between genuine comprehension and statistical mimicry has real consequences. Lisa is a European thought leader in AI Leadership, combining strategic vision with expertise in process management and requirements engineering. She shapes how the Ternary Intelligence Stack is evaluated not just technically, but socially and ethically — defining what it means for an AI system to be *worthy* of deployment in real-world contexts.

| Role | Focus |
|---|---|
| Societal Integration · Social Technology Lead · AI Ethics | Ecocentric Systems · AI Leadership · Work Transformation · Applied Linguistics · Psychology · Alignment & Safety · Acceptance Criteria |

**Academic Background**
- **MSc Business Engineering** — strategic management, systems thinking, organisational design
- **BA Social Sciences** — social dynamics, human-technology interaction, societal systems
- **Psychology** (studied) — applied expertise in model alignment, safety evaluation, and ecocentric design criteria
- **Linguistics** — specialist skill in language structure, semantics, and the limits of statistical language models

**Connect**
- **LinkedIn:** [Lisa Scharler](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-scharler-innovation-management-technology-entrepreneurship-future-education/?locale=en)
- **Email:** l.scharler@ternlang.com

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### Louis Paul Ehrig  
#### Co-Founder & Head of Public Affairs · Corporate Secretary · Press & Media Relations · Dataset Curator

> *"Quality training data isn't just a technical problem. It's an editorial one."*

Louis brings something rare to a deep-tech team: journalism runs in his blood. His family owns **Augusta Presse GmbH**, a German media house — meaning Louis grew up with editorial rigour, source evaluation, and the discipline of distinguishing verified reporting from noise as a daily practice, not an acquired skill.

At RFI-IRFOS, that instinct translates directly into one of the team's most undervalued functions: **dataset curation and news intelligence**. Louis is the team's real-time filter on what is actually happening in the world. He monitors global news feeds, evaluates source quality, and ensures that Albert's training corpus draws from Reuters-grade primary reporting — not from tabloid half-claims, social media amplification, or opinion dressed as fact. The quality of a language model's world-knowledge is only as good as the quality of its training data; Louis is the editorial layer that enforces that standard.

Beyond dataset work, Louis manages press relations, institutional releases, and external messaging across media and stakeholder channels. He is the team member most attuned to how TIS is perceived by the outside world — and why that perception should be earned through substance, not spin.

| Role | Focus |
|---|---|
| Corporate Secretary · Public Affairs · Dataset Curation | Press Releases · Media Relations · Public Communication · Training Data Quality · News Intelligence |

**Background**
- Family: Augusta Presse GmbH (Germany) — print and media publishing
- Editorial instinct applied to ML training data sourcing and quality control

**Connect**
- **LinkedIn:** [Louis Paul Ehrig](https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-ehrig-317941335/)
- **Email:** l.ehrig@ternlang.com

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## Our Mission

> *"Europe does not need to catch up — it needs to leap ahead."*

We are **Styrian Rebels** in frontier deep technology.

We believe Europe's path to technological sovereignty lies not in competing within the limits of binary hyperscaling, but in advancing toward the next frontier:

**Post-Binary Intelligence**

Ternlang is the first step in this journey — a full-stack ecosystem built on the honest logic of the `trit`. Three states: affirm, reject, or hold. Not because it is simpler — but because it is truer.

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**RFI-IRFOS**  
Research Focus Institute — Interdisciplinary Research Facility for Open Sciences  
Elisabethinergasse 25/10, 8020 Graz, Austria  
**ZVR:** 1015608684  
[ternlang.com](https://ternlang.com)
