Anto Subash
Anto Subash

Software engineer in Vienna.

By day I'm a senior research software engineer at IIASA, where I'm a core developer of Geo-Wiki and build the GIS and AI tooling behind its Earth-observation and citizen-science research.

On my own time I keep building the same idea in different languages: applications made of small, isolated modules that start life as one deployable and stay pleasant to change. It began with the ABP Framework and today it's SimpleModule, in both .NET and Python. I've been an ABP Expert since 2018 and take on freelance projects on the side.

I've written up what I learn since 2020 (81 posts so far), and I build small apps for my own life when nothing else fits.

Work

Senior Research Software Engineer, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

NODES research group · Laxenburg, Austria · since 2017

Geospatial

AI & machine learning

  • Mowing detectionsince 2025

    Validating the Copernicus grassland mowing product against Alpine webcam archives. A multi-stage pipeline of CLIP and self-hosted vision-language models filters webcams and frames down to usable grassland views, and a Vision Transformer ensemble serves the trained classifier over HTTP.

  • Self-hosted inference

    The institute's own GPU inference stack: vLLM serving generation and embedding models, pgvector retrieval, and tensor-parallelism and memory tuning to fit them on shared hardware. I also train colleagues on LLMs and agents.

  • Vision models for field photossince 2026

    Self-hosted vision-language models that classify and anonymise crowdsourced and survey field photos, with configurable pipelines per collection and background workers for long runs.

  • Retrieval-augmented assistantssince 2026

    Qdrant vector search, LLM reranking checked by an evaluation harness, citation and confidence gates, prompt-injection filtering, and per-tenant rate limits and token budgets.

Before IIASA

  • TransPerfect2012–2016

    Full-stack .NET developer in Chennai on TransCEND, a virtual data room with security and audit controls, and TransPort, the client portal for translation requests and delivery.

Now

Apps

Open source

Everything else on GitHub

Writing

All 81 posts on the blog