Meet Saku : Visidon’s AI Software Engineer

” As a non-information-technology graduate, Visidon provides me the opportunity to learn and work on new things, without any job experience!”

 

2 March 2022

I am Saku Moilanen, an AI software engineer here at Visidon. I graduated from the University of Oulu and my major was Master of Science in technology in biomedical engineering. I enjoy reading, music and like to watch and play several different sports. I have been at Visidon since May 2019, at first starting as a summer employee, but later getting a regular position.

I found Visidon at Pestipäivät in early 2019, where I got to talk to some of my future colleagues. I was looking for a summer job – my first job in the field of medical and wellness technology.  Visidon was not a company that was working in my field of studies, but the possibility of working with AI and image processing got me to apply for a summer job. I was still working on my bachelor’s thesis while applying to Visidon. Getting a summer job at technology at that stage of my studies was truly a blessing! It felt very good that Visidon was willing to offer me an opportunity to work and learn new things, even without any job experience.

My first task with artificial intelligence was cleaning a dataset used in facial recognition, which is one of the more crucial tasks when training any AI models. The models are only as good as the data used in training them. Slowly, I got to start to familiarize myself with using TensorFlow, an open-source platform for machine learning. TensorFlow is a Python library that invokes C++ in constructing and executing neural networks. This results in fast runtime, but easier scripting with Python. Ever since I have been slowly mastering the use of TensorFlow with different neural networks.

I have worked in several projects concerning image and video processing using AI: multi-frame image denoising, many different classifiers such as smile and face mask, video deinterlacing, and frame interpolation, to name a few. It has been very interesting and educational to work on several different technologies and processes for embedded devices and cloud computing. The usual workflow is prototyping and developing neural networks. After the quality of those is sufficient, it is time for my colleagues to implement them in products.

 “It has been very interesting and educational to work on several different technologies and processes for embedded devices and cloud computing. The usual workflow is prototyping and developing neural networks.”

In addition to prototyping and developing, I have made a demonstration video about our denoising technologies to Embedded Vision Summit 2021. It was cool that our video was selected as one of the best of the EVS and was visible on their website even before the summit started. I have also created and been maintaining the template repositories and guides for new AI engineers, so they can get started with TensorFlow quickly.

Currently, I have been focusing on video enhancement neural networks, which I find very interesting. Neural networks have almost endless possibilities and the capability for many different tasks. The amount of help available is substantial, as Visidon’s employees are highly skilled in their respective jobs and are always willing to teach others.

The people working at Visidon are a good mix of younger, recently graduated people and older, experienced guys. As mentioned earlier, I had zero job experience in technology before Visidon but ever since day one, I have had all the guidance and help that I have needed and wanted. Visidon was also helpful to me in the form of providing me with my master’s thesis topic, even though we are currently not in the field of biomedical engineering.

I am not the only non-information-technology graduate working at Visidon. To the best of my knowledge, there are also people from different backgrounds including physics and electrical engineering. This cross-fielded group of people brings an interesting mix of different skills under one ceiling. Apart from working hours, we have also some activities during our free time, such as a regular shift playing futsal and other sports and some Counter-Strike. I have enjoyed not only playing games with my colleagues during my free time but also the daily table tennis matches when at the office.

” We have people from diverse backgrounds which brings an interesting  mix of different skills under one ceiling. During our free time, we play futsal, Counter-Strike, and table tennis. “

In the winter of 2018, I ran across Kanaliiga, a corporate eSports league. As an avid Counter-Strike player, I started asking around the office if there were interested players to participate in the next season of Kanaliiga and luckily found enough to register as a team. Ever since I have captained, and organized CS matches once or twice a week against teams from other companies around Finland and abroad. The matches have been a great success among my co-workers, and they spur lots of conversations on match days and the days after. At the time of publishing this career story, Visidon is also the main sponsor of Kanaliiga for the second consecutive season! 

-Saku-

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