About
A little about me
Researching and developing systems for railway autonomy — and writing down what the work teaches me.
I'm Joel Mwaka, a research data scientist at Hitachi Rail in Stuttgart. I research and develop systems in railway autonomy, and supervise student research projects in collaboration with the University of Stuttgart and the Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg.
When a project teaches me something, I try to write it down — which is how this site's notes and blog came to exist.
Away from work you'll find me watching or playing football, on a basketball court once in a while, or building iOS and web apps for the fun of it.
Toolbox
- Languages
- PythonC/C++SQLBash
- ML & AI
- PyTorchTensorFlowscikit-learnMLflowHugging FaceLangChain
- Methods
- Deep Reinforcement LearningGenerative AI & LLMsComputer VisionNLPMLOps
- Ops & Data
- DockerJenkins / CI-CDLinuxREST APIsPandasNumPy
Experience & education
Research Data Scientist, AI & Autonomous Systems · Hitachi Rail
Researching and developing systems in railway autonomy. Supervising student research projects in collaboration with the University of Stuttgart and the Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg.
Working Student & Master Thesis, AI for Rail · Thales GTS (now Hitachi Rail)
DQN and PPO for autonomous train control; automated testing frameworks and software tooling for rail control systems.
M.Sc. Autonomous Systems · University of Stuttgart
Thesis on deep reinforcement learning for train speed-profile optimization. Machine learning, computer vision, pattern recognition, signal processing, control theory.
Research Assistant & Bachelor Thesis · Fraunhofer IGCV
Vision-based transportation system for an Industry 4.0 manufacturing platform, and computer vision for automated production environments.
B.Sc. Automation Technology · Hochschule Mannheim
Control theory, robotics, electronics, embedded systems, industrial automation. Thesis: a vision-based autonomous transportation system for Industry 4.0.
Publications
Get in touch
Open to interesting problems and good conversations. The fastest way to reach me is email.