About me
Bio
Despite my severe visual impairment (<5% of a normal humans ability to see, <2% is considered blind) I got my bachelors degree in computer sciences in 2017 at the age of 22. After trying to apply for a job as a data scientist without success I decided to start my own small consulting business. Since then I have been working as an IT consultant for all kinds of startups, non-profit organizations and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Because of my visual impairment and because I received a lot of support both during my studies and my business activities I co-founded (in 2015) a non profit organization (BV-I) that helps other people with all kinds of disadvantages. From October 2020 to March 2021 I went back to university to complete my masters degree in computer science in parallel to growing my business. I am eager to learn, continuously improve and to get to know interesting companies and people.
In my spare time I enjoy doing sports. I used to do a lot of martial arts. Today I mostly go jogging or to the gym. Although I am not very good at it I cook almost every day. Another passion of mine is investing, mostly index investing and algorithmic trading. I started over 10 years ago and still enjoy watching my strategies generate money. In between customer projects I work on a couple of pet projects in order to not get out of practice.
My Business
I started my business by helping customers with setting up their website to improve their online presence, with digitalizing their processes to increase productivity and with realizing their own software solutions. Over the years my business transitioned more and more towards helping companies to find the right Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) or non-ML solutions that fit their needs. I think while large companies have the resources to develop AI / ML tools and products on their own, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often do not understand the value of their data and do not have sufficient demand to justify employing an entire team of AI / ML experts to exploit that opportunity. For this reason I want to help SMEs to collect data, analyze and extract insights through the use of ML and non-ML approaches and build appropriate AI / ML / non-ML solution to increase their productivity and make them more competitive.
My observation is that the terms AI / ML are overused and misunderstood. For most SMEs AI / ML plays a supporting role. It can make logistics more efficient (for example through demand forecasting), increase online sales (for example through recommendation engines) or it can make marketing efforts more effective. In some cases it might be worth looking into developing a custom AI / ML solution to automate one or more steps of an internal process (for example through fault detection or text recognition). In rare cases AI / ML can also be part of the end product. While there are infinite possibilities of using AI / ML there are just a few that are commercially viable. In a lot of cases approaches using common statistics are simpler, cheaper and more robust when it comes to deployment in the real world. Nonetheless I see a great potential for most SMEs to benefit from collecting data. We are still at the beginning of the information age where data is the new oil.
If you want to know the potential of using AI / ML / statistical analysis to improve your business contact me for a free initial consultation.