🎓 Summer school · 6–17 Jul 2026
Tsinghua University, Shenzhen
Heading to Shenzhen for a two-week summer school at Tsinghua University (SIGS).
Now & next
🎓 Summer school · 6–17 Jul 2026
📄 NeurIPS preprint · May 2026
FTerViT: Fully Ternary Vision Transformer
New preprint on fully ternary vision transformers. Each weight is one of three values, which shrinks the model and cuts its memory-bandwidth needs, the real bottleneck on edge chips.
arXiv:2605.21171 ↗
🤖 Hackathon · Forgis
Forgis Physical AI Hackathon
Competing in Forgis's physical-AI robotics hackathon, run with Google DeepMind and IBM.
▶ Watch the demo ↗
🎓 Doctoral exam · 2026
Passed my doctoral exam
Cleared the ETH doctoral exam, examined by Prof. Luca Benini, Prof. Michele Magno, and Dr. Nadim Maamari.
🎤 Talk · tinyML
Presenting at tinyML, Lausanne
Giving a talk at the tinyML event hosted at the Logitech HQ in Lausanne.
🔬 Research trip · Sep 2025
TSMC & AI hardware, Taiwan
Visited TSMC's Hsinchu fab and met semiconductor researchers across Taiwan.
Read the post ↗01 /
About
I'm Szymon Ruciński, a PhD researcher in electrical engineering at ETH Zürich (D-ITET) and CSEM. I work on running modern AI on small, power-constrained hardware: microcontrollers, AI camera sensors, and embedded boards like NVIDIA Jetson, mostly for robotics and industrial perception. I'm part of SwissChips, the prestigious CSEM–EPFL–ETH Zürich initiative strengthening Switzerland's semiconductor base end to end — chip design, chip production, and running intelligence on the chips themselves.
Day to day that means model compression (quantization and pruning), hardware-aware training, and perception pipelines that fit the chip they run on. With years of experience as a machine learning engineer and machine learning architect, before the PhD I built production systems at Accenture, TransPerfect, Samsung R&D, and Visium: agentic AI for enterprises, custom translation models, and computer-vision pipelines.
On the side I train and open-source Polish language models, and I mentor students at ETH's Robotics and Analytics clubs. I've won AI hackathons for the United Nations and with Samsung's translation team. What I care about most is getting research out of the notebook and onto real hardware.
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Experience
2025–now
PhD Researcher
ETH Zürich (D-ITET) & CSEM · Zürich / Neuchâtel
Model compression for transformers (quantization, pruning) and hardware-aware perception pipelines for robotics. I deploy on microcontrollers, AI camera sensors, NVIDIA Jetson, and DGX Spark, and train at scale on HPC clusters.
2023–now
Machine Learning Engineer
TransPerfect (formerly Apostroph AG) · Zürich
Set up an in-house data center. Built custom LLMs that improved translation quality in French, English, German, and Italian, made the production model 5× faster to serve, and added retrieval-augmented search over the internal knowledge base.
Dec 24–Mar 25
Machine Learning Architect
Accenture Schweiz · Zürich
Built multimodal and agentic AI systems and MCP servers for enterprise clients. Cut call-center ticket resolution from six hours to five minutes at 84% success, on-premise and on Azure. Led a small engineering team across Berlin and Stuttgart.
Sep 22–Feb 23
Junior Machine Learning Engineer
Visium SA · Zürich / Lausanne
Built unsupervised computer-vision anomaly detection that improved faulty-sample identification by 97%. Found and fixed errors in a chemical manufacturer's dataset, which raised output by 20%. Also shipped a document data-extraction system and an internal package for prototyping CNNs.
2020–2021
Machine Learning Engineer
Samsung Research & Development · Warsaw
AI translation for low-resource languages, including Indian dialects. Built synthetic text-generation and quality pipelines over hundreds of terabytes, and shipped NLP features in Bixby. My team, SRPOL, won WAT-2021.
Worked with & for
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Publications & Preprints
PreprintMay 2026
FTerViT: Fully Ternary Vision Transformer
PreprintFeb 2024
Efficient Language Adaptive Pre-training: Extending SOTA LLMs for Polish
Open modelLLM
krakowiak-7b
One of the largest open Polish LLMs when it was released. I cleaned and assembled the training data, fine-tuned the model, served it on cheap CPU-only hardware, and released it free for anyone to use.
Open modelSpeech
Skryba-v1
A 1.5-billion-parameter Polish speech-recognition model that captions in real time. Fine-tuned on 50,000 audio and text pairs, and open-sourced on Hugging Face.
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Community & Mentoring
2026–nowRobot Learning
ETH Robotics Club
I mentor students in the Robot Learning Division and work on world models and reinforcement learning for robots. We compete in robotics hackathons with partners including OpenAI, Tesla, ABB Robotics, NVIDIA, Hugging Face, and AWS.
2023–nowETH Analytics Club
Hack4Good · Team Mentor
I mentor ETH student teams. One project built an NLP tool for WWF Switzerland, where I helped with the modelling and kept the work organized.
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Education
2025–now
PhD · Electrical Engineering & Information Technology
ETH Zürich (D-ITET) & CSEM · Zürich / Neuchâtel
Supervised by Prof. Michele Magno & Dr. Nadim Maamari.
2021–2022
MSc · Software Engineering & Machine Learning
Lodz University of Technology · Łódź, Poland
2021–2022
MSc · Data Science (Exchange)
Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (FHNW) · Brugg / Zürich
Supervised by Prof. Dr. Daniel Perruchoud.
2017–2021
BSc · Information Technology
Lodz University of Technology, International Faculty of Engineering · Łódź
2020
BSc · Software Engineering (Exchange)
Fachhochschule Vorarlberg (FHV) · Dornbirn, Austria
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Certifications & Bootcamps
- English C1 · German B2 (Goethe) · Mandarin Chinese beginner (UZH, 1 semester)
- Model Parallelism: Large Neural Networks · NVIDIA DLI
- Transformer-Based NLP Applications · NVIDIA DLI
- AI: Modern Methods · Goethe University Frankfurt
- Building LLM-Powered Apps · Weights & Biases