What Switzerland's federal railway, and its peers, publicly do with machine learning. Compiled from primary sources for a master's thesis application.
SBB's named group for vision-based infrastructure inspection. Co-led by Dr. Ilir Fetai (Albanian, see section 02) and Dr. Andre Roger.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning for train rescheduling on a 2D rail grid. SBB ran the original 2019 edition, then co-organized the NeurIPS 2020 edition jointly with Deutsche Bahn and SNCF.
Wayside strain-gauge sensors capture 8 measurements per wheel pass. Cyclic-shift-invariant neural nets exploit the periodic sensor geometry to detect:
Active PhD: Sophia Kuhn in Walter Kaufmann's bridge group, co-supervised by Fernando Pérez-Cruz (ETH CS).
Helicopter-captured orthophotos plus Picterra's geospatial platform detect neophyte plants along tracks.
SBB and BCG: extended reality and AI applied to fleet maintenance workflows. Public framing is reliability and cost reduction.
Industry-wide architecture program (SBB, BLS, SOB, RhB, VöV) covering traffic management, electronic interlocking, localization, and automatic train operation.
110+ public repos. ML-relevant subset:
sbb-ml-models, mobile object detection for train components (lighting, side windows, loudspeakers). Archived.sbb-ml-ios, Core ML + Combine inferencesbb-ml-android, TFLite / YOLO inferenceSBB-IIoT-to-SAP-PdMS, edge preprocessing for SAP Predictive Maintenance ServicesCo-Creating Mobility Hubs. SBB-funded, jointly run on station and mobility-hub transformation.
Dominik Finzer's 2023 thesis on topic modeling of free-text customer comments. Now at SBB Customer Experience & Analytics. A documented thesis-collaboration template.
Markov-chain network-risk model built on SBB's published daily train-traffic streams.
Fetai is Albanian, teaches at the main Albanian-language university in the region, and leads the SBB group most aligned with an AI thesis. A direct, Albanian-language outreach from Roni lands in a category that no German-speaking applicant can replicate.
Channel. Email direct, not via SBB careers form. SBB email pattern: firstname.lastname@sbb.ch. Cross-reference via LinkedIn before sending.
Language. Open in Albanian. One short paragraph, then switch to English for the technical pitch. This signals the connection without making him do extra work.
Subject line angle. Reference the 2022 Applied Sciences paper or the AMLD talk by name. Proves you read.
Pitch hooks. Two of these, not all. (1) Bioinformatics ML transferring to safety-critical inspection-CV under distribution shift. (2) The POC-to-production gap his Applied Sciences paper named, framed as the kind of thesis problem you want. (3) His own trajectory from distributed systems to ML mirrors your willingness to cross domains from bioinformatics.
Ask. Concrete: a 20-minute call to discuss whether a thesis fits, and what supervision route works (SBB-direct vs co-supervised with a university PI).
Strategic AI bets: predictive maintenance and automated dispatching.
Within the research budget no primary sources at comparable depth were found for:
Vibration, acoustic, strain. DB Konux switches · SBB WLC · NS SLT HealthMeter.
Inspection trains, drones, on-board cameras. SBB + LatticeFlow + Siemens · SBB Picterra · South Eastern UK.
The Flatland line. SBB + DB + SNCF, NeurIPS 2020.
SBB-funded ZHAW automated timetabling. SNCF marshalling-yard solver.
NS XGBoost with network features. LNER delay-risk model.
SBB / HSLU customer-comment topic modeling. SNCF Group GPT.
ETH-SBB bridge surrogates. SNCF physics-plus-data rail-fatigue models.
ETH IVT theses on energy-efficient driving and railway power peaks.
sbb-ml-models mobile pipeline is archived; ask whether on-device CV is dormant or has migrated into the inspection-train pipeline.