Kurt Demaagd
Chief AI Officer at Sight Machine
Chelsea, Michigan, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKurt Demaagd is a Chief AI Officer with 13+ years leading AI/ML initiatives that bridge research rigor and industrial execution, currently driving data-driven transformation at Sight Machine. He specializes in integrating diverse manufacturing data sources—PLCs, Historians, MES/ERP, QMS and ad-hoc spreadsheets—and turning them into trustworthy, operational ML solutions from scheduling optimizers to predictive maintenance and retraining pipelines for computer vision. Kurt has led and scaled teams of data engineers and scientists while often serving as the customer-facing technical lead who translates plant-floor constraints into pragmatic models and production-ready systems. His algorithm choices balance accuracy with user trust and operational speed, spanning methods from functional data analysis and genetic algorithms to NLP, clustering and deep learning. With a PhD in Business Administration and a background as an academic and open-source Perl community leader, he combines economic thinking about IT value with hands-on software craftsmanship across Python, R and multiple legacy languages. An underrated strength is his experience operationalizing models in low-control, real-world environments—where robustness and retrainability matter more than peak benchmark scores.
13 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D Business Administration, Ph.D Business Administration at University of MichiganB.S Computer Science, B.S Computer Science at Hope College
Github Skills (8)
python5
image-processing5
computer-vision4
deep-learning3
pytorch3
machine-learning3
object-detection3
machine-vision3
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (4)
sightmachine/sightmachine-sdk
Sep 2020 - Sep 2022
Contributions:25 reviews, 88 commits, 26 PRs in 2 years
sightmachine/sm_excel
Dec 2021 - Feb 2022
Contributions:1 push in 1 month
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