Miguel Rodriguez

Career & Projects

• 2016 — 2026
  BigBear Engineering GmbH

  Founder & Engineering Consultant · Mettmenstetten, Zürich

  Engineering consultancy spanning AI infrastructure and industrial digitalization.

  • 2026 — present
    Sovereign Mind

    On-device RAG knowledge platform for field and industrial teams. Cited answers from your own documents, fully offline via MLX (Apertus) — with a web admin console and a thumbs-down → FAQ improvement flywheel. iOS app plus web console.

    App Console demo Demo video TestFlight
  • 2024 — present
    Robot Ross

    Cyber-physical AI art system: Huenit robot arm driven by Claude reasoning and locally hosted Apertus 8B, with a serial bridge to a G-code controller. Produces an EU AI Act Automated Technical File as a living wiki generated automatically from source code and operational log files.

    GitHub Project robotross.art ATF demo
  • 2026 — present
    Silicon Oracle

    On-device AI oracle for iOS. Local VLM (Qwen2-VL) captions each photo; Ministral 3B generates the oracle card reading. Choose a character persona — Shakespeare, Sherlock, Diva, or Manga — for a shareable 9:16 reading. Full on-device inference via MLX; no cloud dependency.

    Case Study App TestFlight
  • 2026 — present
    Canis

    On-device LLM interpretability: an expressive dog avatar that reads a model's disposition from J-space — so you can see when it is confident, unsure, refusing, or evasive before it speaks. Runs open-weight models (Apertus, Ministral) fully on iPhone. Built for the Oct 2026 interpretability hackathon.

    Project GitHub
  • 2026 — present
    Apertus-Flotilla

    A QLoRA fine-tune of Apertus 8B trained on operational data from the Flotilla multi-agent fleet — 399 SFT examples, 51 DPO preference pairs, 50 held-out eval records. A four-arm blind evaluation (base/LoRA × no-RAG/RAG, graded independently by Qwen 2.5 7B and Claude Opus) found that retrieval accounts for the entire performance gain: under byte-identical retrieved context the adapter significantly degrades answer quality relative to its own base model (Δ = −1.02 and −0.92 on the two graders, both p < 0.0001). Corpus, adapter and per-question scores publicly released.

    Corpus (GitHub) Adapter (HuggingFace) Knowledge Wiki Evaluation
  • 2026 — present
    Classic Reel Tales

    Cinematic engine for authors. Manuscripts to 90-second vertical microdramas via Claude, Runway Gen-3, ElevenLabs, Suno, and FFmpeg. Built at the Runway API Hackathon, May 2026.

    GitHub Project Shop YouTube
  • 2025 — present
    Flotilla

    Open-source multi-agent coordination framework. Claude, Gemini, and open-weight models as a coordinated fleet with shared state, cross-model peer review, and circuit-breaker patterns.

    GitHub Project Demo
  • 2025 — present
    The Classical Remix

    AI-generated music brand reimagining classical works across genres — Celtic, vallenato, progressive house, EDM. Four albums on Spotify.

    YouTube
  • 2024 — 2025
    Klepsydra Technologies

    Program management for ESA certification of an embedded AI inference engine for high-performance imaging in space.

    klepsydra.com
  • 2022 — 2024
    OPC UA — Wire Harness Companion Spec (OPC 40570)

    Led the international working group that defined the OPC UA Companion Specification for the wire harness industry, collaborating with global automotive OEMs through ARENA2036 in Stuttgart.

    OPC Foundation
  • 2020 — 2022
    Next2OEM — Audi · Komax

    At Audi, coordinated the data communication of all Komax wire-processing machines on the production floor — part of Audi's broader AI-in-production initiative.

    Audi MediaCenter
  • 2020 — 2022
    Axetris

    Evaluation and selection of a Manufacturing Execution System for Axetris's semiconductor production line.
  • 2018 — 2026
    Komax — Digital Marketplace

    Program-managing the digital platform for Komax, the global market leader in wire-processing machinery. Leading a team of fifteen integrating cloud services, predictive maintenance, and AI-powered analytics.

    Komax Smart Services
  • 2017 — 2018
    Kistler

    Integration of a Manufacturing Execution System with Kistler's sensor software for plastic injection moulding machines.
  • 2016 — 2017
    Weavr — Virtual Reality Startup

    Founded Weavr, a platform to create navigable VR environments used by cities such as St. Gallen and Basel, as well as companies seeking immersive experience showcases. Successful exit to BitForge AG.
• 2009 — 2016
  digitalSTROM AG

  Director of Research & Development · Schlieren, Zürich

  Directed R&D for home automation. Managed a team of thirty engineers across embedded Linux (ARM/DSP), Azure cloud back-ends, and cross-platform mobile apps. Led the first cloud-based voice control features in the home automation sector.
• 2005 — 2009
  BridgeCo Inc. (acquired by Microchip)

  Head of Digital Media Player Software Group · Dübendorf

  Led software for networked audio ICs; managed twenty developers across Switzerland, India, and Eastern Europe. Initiated the project that brought Apple AirPlay into the customer portfolio.
• 1996 — 2005
  ESEC SA (acquired by Besi)

  Group Manager & Project Manager · Cham, Zug

  Architected a three-tier loose-coupled architecture for semiconductor packaging machine control. Managed a CHF 5M R&D project.
• 1995 — 1996
  Institut für Robotik · ETH Zürich

  Academic Guest · Zürich

  Robotics researcher on a nanorobotics project — graphical user interfaces for manipulating objects in the micro-world with a high-precision robot. Three peer-reviewed papers from this work.

Publications

• 2026
  Graceful Degradation in Subscription-Constrained Multi-Agent Orchestration Systems

  arXiv preprint (cs.SE) · PDF · 75 days of production telemetry released
• 2026
  Reading Disposition from Smartphone-Class Open Models: A Forward-Only J-Space Probe on Apertus-4B, Ministral-3B and Qwen3-4B

  arXiv preprint (stat.ML) · PDF · corpus, calibration vectors & per-item scores released
• 2024
  A Process Model for Deriving Asset Administration Shells for Inter-Company Collaboration — A Practical Approach

  Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (Springer), pp. 217–229
• 2015
  Using consumer behavior data to reduce energy consumption in smart homes

  IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, Miami FL
• 2015
  Energy saving in smart homes based on consumer behavior: A case study

  IEEE International Smart Cities Conference, Guadalajara
• 2012
  Smart Energy Case Study

  ACM BuildSys Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficiency in Buildings, Toronto
• 1997
  Graphical user interface to manipulate objects in the micro world with a high precision Robot

  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Albuquerque NM
• 1996
  Field experiences on the implementation of a graphical user interface in microrobotics

  SPIE Photonics East, Boston MA
• 1996
  Human Machine Interaction for manipulations in the microworld

  IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Communication, Tsukuba
• 1991
  Development of a solid modeler using object oriented programming

  SCOOP West, San Jose CA

Writing

Books

The Lost Coins

A sci-fi thriller about a mafia group trying to steal a high-value cryptocurrency wallet.

Amazon →

The Power of Social Media

A collection of articles on the psychology behind social media.

Amazon →

Internet Funniest E-Mails
Fouque Verlag, 1999

Internet Funniest E-Mails

Frankfurt: Fouque Literaturverlag, 1999. Curated from a website started during my ETH stay.

ISBN 3-826-74358-X

Music · The Classical Remix

Education

• 1989 — 1991
  M.Sc. Mechanical Engineering

  Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX
• 1985 — 1989
  B.Sc. Mechanical Engineering

  Universidad de las Américas, Puebla