Hello World!

This is me and you're reading my project blog.
My name is Raphael Pisoni, I am an environmental Engineer turned Computer Scientist turned Machine Learning Engineer. I currently work as a Senior ML-Engineer at partium.io but whenever I have time, I try to work on fun and interesting projects to learn something new.
In this blog I will show you some of them.

I come from a little city in the north of Italy where I stayed until I had finished high school. Since I was very interested in STEM I then moved to Vienna where I studied Environmental Engineering and Water Management at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU). Close to finishing my bachelors I was hit by a serious illness which required me to go back to my hometown and stay in the hospital for a while. There and during recovery at home I started to work on my first machine learning projects and read a lot about the basic concepts of ML. Soon I became very excited about the potential of these rather new technologies (this was in 2013, back then I knew no one seriously involved in ML). I decided that while recovering I should do some Computer Science courses at the Free University of Bolzano which happened to be nearby. This was supposed to give me the theoretical foundations of computer science to allow me to go deeper in my projects involving machine learning and computer vision.

At the Free University of Bolzano I got a lot of support from professor Tammam Tillo who shared my interest for machine learning and computer vision and soon offered me a desk in a PhD. office. With his help I got into the topic of depth estimation using neural networks. I wrote two papers and my bachelor thesis about this topic. I tried to get the papers into NeurIPS 2018 and 2019 and one of them into CVPR 2020 but none of them were accepted.😢

Allthough I wasn't done with my computer science bachelor, in 2019 I managed to find a great job as an ML-Engineer at the R&D department of Partium.io. There I mainly work on Visual Search and Multimodal Search but also do some NLU and Text Search.

Outside of work I try to stay current by doing lots of personal projects as well as participating in hackathons and competitions.

If you would like to get in touch, feel free to drop me a mail.