Meet our Team

Alex Schmitz

Core competences

  • Machine Learning
  • Data Lakes
  • Software Development
  • Systems Architecture

More than 25 years of computer science, and 15+ years of Machine Learning make Alexander a solid systems architect and a ML wizard who is versed in almost all frameworks. He is equally experienced in Data Warehousing and Data Lakes, with solid data governance knowledge.

Sample Projects

Electrical Switch Monitor

Public transportation: using AI-driven vision to monitor old-fashioned electrical relays and also to evaluate potential failures for predictive maintenance.

Hydropower Plant Control

Hydropower plants: create a control and monitoring solution for all plant operations, including predictive maintenance and intrusion mon­itoring.

Electrical Switch Monitoring

For a public transportation network, the objective was to optimize the monitoring of their legacy electrical switchboards. These decade-old items that are often located in very remote areas are prone to failures and tracking of errors was not possible. The objective was to enable real-time tracking and the recognition of upcoming failures from changed switching behavior. The key elements were:

  • Development of specific hardware configuration with custom housings (3D printed) to mount instead of regular switchboard covers;
  • Camera control and initial image generation on Raspberry Pi integrated in housing;
  • Initial scan of switch layout and labels;
  • Identification of switching operations and registration of new positions;
  • Identification of irregular switching patterns (delays, other irregularities) to indicate upcoming failures for predictive maintenance;
  • Update of central database and cloud solution with last state and observed switching patterns;

The solution was implemented using Python on Raspberry Pi devices, backbone and cloud processing were done using a LAMP stack, using PyTorch, TensorFlow and OpenCV.