About Me
Hello! I’m Michael. I am a seasoned professional with a passion for building and innovation. With a Ph.D. in Computer Vision from ETH Zurich and industry experience from Google and as a co-founder of Cerrion, and with over a decade of experience in Python programming, I have a track record of delivering high-quality software. At Cerrion, a YCombinator Startup, I served as the CTO and led a talented team of six engineers in backend development and computer vision. As a reseacher, I have published 30+ papers with 2600+ citations.
Currently, I am a Principal Applied Scientist at Zalando Switzerland, leading applied research in the redesign of our search architecture. My recent work includes developing a CLIP-based neural retrieval system, achieving a 20% increase in neural search high-value actions, and advancing our LLM-powered assistant by optimizing generation quality and latency. These efforts resulted in multiple successful A/B tests and measurable improvements in user engagement.
My research interests lay in continual learning, multimodal foundation models and large language models.
For more detail on my background, please refer to my CV.