
Tobias Plötz
Verified Expert in Engineering
Machine Learning Developer
Griesheim, Hesse, Germany
Toptal member since June 7, 2022
Tobias is a machine learning consultant focusing on computer vision and text analytics. He is experienced in identifying impactful data science use cases and driving projects from ideation to product in international team setups. Tobias values impact over hype, looking for the solution that provides the best fit for the problem at hand. He holds a Ph.D. in computer vision, having published several papers at top-tier conferences.
Portfolio
Experience
- Machine Learning - 12 years
- Computer Vision - 10 years
- Image Recognition - 10 years
- Deep Learning - 8 years
- PyTorch - 5 years
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) - 3 years
- TensorFlow - 3 years
- Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) - 3 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
PyCharm, MacOS, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Git, Linux, Windows, Python, TensorFlow, PyTorch
The most amazing...
...vision system I've built is running multiple recognition stages to analyze millions of patents and extract previously inaccessible chemical information.
Work Experience
Senior Data Scientist
Merck KGaA
- Built a computer vision pipeline analyzing millions of patents and extracting previously inaccessible chemical information.
- Built a semantic search engine based on state-of-the-art open source NLP models to search different corpora with up to multi-million documents, including a question-answering capability leveraging GPT-3.
- Created a smart search system enabling users to quickly set up personalized document retrieval systems on large document collections to cut down manual screening efforts.
- Consulted internal stakeholders on data science projects, from use case identification and solutioning to implementing an MVP and productizing the solution.
- Educated peers on foundational topics in machine learning and cutting-edge research.
- Improved internal development best practices by monitoring the machine learning and data science tool landscape.
Experience
Computer Vision System for Chemical Data Extraction
https://lewisapp.com/Our solution is powered by modern deep learning techniques and enables the recognition of small and very large molecules. Our solution allows searches for already patented molecules by automatically screening millions of patents and extracting chemical information therein.
We focused on quickly building an MVP and iterating from there in an agile framework during development.
Automated Screening of Large Document Collections
As a special twist to this project, the systems need to adapt to each user's preference of what constitutes a relevant document while avoiding a lengthy training process and providing highly accurate predictions from the start.
To meet these goals, I employed weakly supervised learning techniques that effectively allowed us to set up an accurate user-specific classifier in less than an hour. Thus, the system could provide value to the user right away, cutting down on manual screening efforts while continuously improving through user feedback.
Neural Nearest Neighbors Networks
https://github.com/visinf/n3netIn my paper, the neural nearest neighbors layer is used mainly in the context of image restoration. Other researchers have applied the layer to a multitude of different problems like 3D reconstruction, graph learning, or deriving model explanations. Neural nearest neighbors generalize the well-known transformer module that powers state-of-the-art research in natural language processing and computer vision.
Semantic Search and Question Answering System
Education
Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science
TU Darmstadt - Darmstadt, Germany
Master's Degree in Computer Science
TU Darmstadt - Darmstadt, Germany
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
TU Darmstadt - Darmstadt, Germany
Skills
Libraries/APIs
PyTorch, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, Pandas, PySpark, SpaCy
Tools
PyCharm, Git, Gensim
Languages
Python
Frameworks
Spark
Paradigms
Agile
Platforms
MacOS, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, Windows
Other
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Deep Learning, Image Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Data Science, Image Processing, OpenAI, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), Research, Scripting, Natural Language Queries, Technical Hiring, Interviewing, Code Review
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring