Project
TLDR: TiME distills small, monolingual Transformer encoders (3 sizes across 16 languages) from large teachers like XLM-R-Large. The models retain 98% of teacher accuracy while being up to 5x faster...
David Schulmeister
Building efficient NLP systems and applied ML products.
B.Sc. Information Systems @ KIT | M.Sc. Computer Science @ KIT & EPFL
About Me
Hi, I'm David. I work on production-grade NLP systems, model distillation, and efficient retrieval pipelines. I like translating research into deployable products with clear metrics and explainability baked in.
On the side, I take on freelance projects and enjoy collaborating on interesting challenges. If you have an idea or project you'd like to explore together, don't hesitate to get in touch.
Beyond the Code
When I'm not at the keyboard, you'll likely find me outdoors. I love hiking, skiing, and traveling to new places. I'm also passionate about learning languages. More recently, I've caught the running bug: I've completed several half marathons, and I'm training for my first full marathon this year, with a triathlon on the horizon after that.
Technical Interests
- LLMs, retrieval, distillation, XAI
- Reinforcement learning and agentic workflows
- Outlier detection and anomaly-heavy datasets
- Applied ML in medicine and education
- Economics and decision-making under uncertainty
Featured Projects
Project
Overview Building an explainable NLP system for German primary school reports to support retrospective ADHD assessment in collaboration with clinicians.
Project
The Emotions We Try to Hide
Project
The Problem with Outliers in High Dimensions
Project
Building Security Into Software Design: A Practical Guide to Secure Design Patterns
From the Blog
October 08, 2025
In this post I want to share how I relearned French in about a year. What does “relearn” mean? It means I didn’t start from scratch. I had French in school for four years, but I was a terrible stud...
September 22, 2025
Last week I attended the Mediterranean Machine Learning Summer School (M2L) 2025 in Split, Croatia. Five days of lectures, labs, posters, and conversations with 300+ participants from 56 countries....
June 18, 2022
The $500 Billion Question
December 17, 2021
Welcome to my newly polished website! I’ve updated the design to be cleaner and more responsive.