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 for 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, 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.

Research

Papers and conference contributions I co-authored at IIASA.

  • Geo-Quest2025

    Mobile ground-data collection enhanced by Earth observation. Conference contribution at the Living Planet Symposium.LPS 2025

  • Picture Pile2022–2023

    Citizen science for rapid image classification, AI integration and SDG monitoring. Conference contributions at ISRSE39 and ECSA.ISRSE39 2023ECSA 2022

  • Geo-Wiki2022

    Lessons from collecting reference data with citizens. Journal article in Environmental Research Letters on a decade of Geo-Wiki crowdsourcing campaigns.Journal article

  • Natura Alert2020

    Monitoring biodiversity threats through a mobile app and web portal developed within LandSense. Conference contributions at Knowledge for Change and ECSA.Knowledge for Change 2020ECSA 2020

  • FotoQuest2020

    Citizen observations of land-use change and lessons from the FotoQuest campaigns. Conference contribution at the EGU General Assembly.EGU 2020

  • AgroTutor2020

    A mobile application supporting sustainable agricultural intensification. Journal article in Sustainability, with its earlier preprint.Journal articlePreprint

  • LACO-Wiki Mobile2019

    An open-source application for field data collection and land-cover validation. Conference contribution at the EGU General Assembly.EGU 2019

  • IIASA citizen-science apps2018

    Mobile tools for citizen-led environmental monitoring. Conference contribution at Citizen Observatories for Natural Hazards and Water Management.Conference record

Full research record on IIASA PURE

Open source

Everything else on GitHub