Dr. Matthias Schäfer is an internationally recognized expert in air traffic surveillance. As co-founder and managing director at SeRo Systems, he leads a team that develops proprietary receiver and sensor technology and provides airspace surveillance, monitoring and data analysis services.

Matthias founded SeRo in 2014 with the mission of fostering a fast adoption of next-generation air traffic surveillance technologies by delivering complete situational awareness that protects and maintains the safety and security of the global airspace.He has spent a decade in research and development of novel technologies in the wireless and air traffic surveillance domain. In 2012, he researched the Security of Air Traffic Communication at the University of Oxford, UK and at armasuisse in Switzerland. During this time, he was one of the founders of the OpenSky Network, a global air traffic surveillance network that collects and analyzes data from more than 90,000 flights every day for non-profit research. He remained a member of the OpenSky Board until 2021.

Matthias is the author or co-author of more than 40 scientific publications on ground and space-based air traffic surveillance and helped pioneer research in the field of cybersecurity for communications, navigation and surveillance (CNS) systems. Through his work with armasuisse, he received the 2011 Security Award of the Swiss Department of Defence, as well as multiple Cyber awards for outstanding scientific contributions from the Swiss Federal Department of Defence. His work has also received best paper, and best session and track distinctions from the IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC). His doctoral thesis on solutions to ADS-B Security received the 2018/2019 Prize for outstanding thesis from the RPTU Circle of Friends and the German Society for Computer Science, Measurement, Modelling and Evaluation of Systems (GI/ITG MMB) best MMB dissertation award. He was a lecturer on Network Security at RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau and became a professor for UAV and Avionics at HSRM in 2024.

Matthias holds a BS and MS in Computer Science and earned his Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.) in Computer and Communications Security from the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern.

Markus Fuchs is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at SeRo Systems. With over a decade of experience in the field, Markus is an expert in software engineering, and designing and implementing large-scale monitoring systems with a particular focus on Big Data, scalable data processing technologies and big data applications.

As SeRo’s CTO, Markus has designed many complex data management systems and is SeRo's specialist in all things Big Data. He also serves as the technical lead for EUROCONTROL's 1030/1090 MHz monitoring system, known as the European Monitoring of Interrogators and Transponders (EMIT). This system plays a crucial role in helping European Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) detect and mitigate transponder and interrogator anomalies, ensuring the safety and efficiency of European airspace.

Throughout his career, Markus has made valuable contributions to the development of cutting-edge projects in air traffic surveillance and electromagnetic spectrum monitoring. He played a major role in building the OpenSky Network, a platform that continuously collects, processes, and stores vast amounts of Mode S signals for research purposes, serving thousands of users.

Before co-founding SeRo, Markus conducted research at a number of universities and laboratories in Europe. In 2013, he analyzed internet backbone traffic and conducted in-depth studies on the behavior of interactive traffic using network simulations during his internship at the Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway. He also spent 4 years as a Student Research Assistant at Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, Germany, where he helped develop and improve recommender systems.

Markus holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern.