Coding for Smart Manufacturing and Fashion AI

Coding for Smart Manufacturing and Fashion AI

By Marko Ristin, Ph.D., Artificial Intelligence Director at LocalAway & Researcher at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Hi! My name is Marko, and I currently work and live in Zurich, Switzerland.

I started programming when I was about 6 on a Commodore 64 computer. My programming journey then went on over TI-92+ and x68 computers to cloud computing. I studied computer science, and then pursued a PhD in computer vision and machine learning. Afterwards I worked on diverse projects in the industry, from user profiling to smart cities and airport security.

Currently, I work on two projects. One part of my time is dedicated to smart manufacturing and industrial IoT (Internet of Things) as a researcher with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). The other part, I experiment and create prototypes for LocalAway to see how we can tackle some of the largest problems in the fashion industry using AI. For example, we use off-the-shelf AI solutions to help automate shoppable videos.

The nature of my coding is actually two-fold. On one hand, I work on robust code that aims for efficiency, maintainability and correctness. This code then runs on systems which are business-critical to certain degrees. On the other hand, I play with AI, and produce code which is much less robust, with potentially uncertain behavior and possible bugs.

Both kinds of programs help us automate tasks at scale unthinkable for human labor. I am indeed surprised at the pace how this scale keeps increasing over years, for both kinds of programs.

Some tips for young coders: read books. Think of programming in terms of history, as a living and evolving practice of automating mental tasks. Finally, relax and don’t jump train on every trend — new frameworks come and go all the time.

Tools and Programming Languages I use:

Given the variety of projects I worked thus far, I learned and practiced many different languages: from assembler (x86 and 68k CPUs) to C/C++, then Matlab, Java, Scala, C# and Golang, and finally Python which is at the moment the language I use the most.

As for developer tools, I converted from a vim fan to a passionate user of JetBrains products over the years.