Pilish
An Emacs frontend for the pi coding agent, begun with a wish for a flicker-free interface, separate chat and prompt windows, and conversation-tree navigation. Other contributors and a co-maintainer later joined.
AI/ML engineer · Malmö, Sweden
Hello.
I'm Daniel.
I'm Daniel Nouri, an AI/ML engineer in Malmö. I build machine-learning systems and ways to check their answers. Recent work includes sustainability-document verification, financial-data querying, and an autonomous research loop. My CV has the details.
Whale-call traces morph into a bird. Listen plays a right-whale recording; Look switches to the bird and pauses playback.
Selected work and experiments
Some work worth telling you about,
including the wrong turns.
Whales and PhotoID
In 2013 I detected right-whale calls in hydrophone recordings by turning audio into spectrograms and using a convolutional network designed for images. The model did well in Kaggle's whale-detection challenge. Then researchers at Oregon State University supplied much messier continuous recordings.
My shiny model was lousy on them. I had some listening to do. The competition examples had been preselected by another detector, so many confusing sounds were missing from training. I started again with a few hundred examples. I listened to the worst mistakes, labelled them, and fed them back into training. Then I repeated the process. The whale post explains what happened.
PhotoID began because I'm bad at identifying birds and wanted to learn their names. I built the recognition backend and public Twitter bots for birds, butterflies, and wildflowers. Asked to identify a moorhen, it answered mallard. Its second guess was moorhen.
Teaching Python
In 2009 and 2010 I volunteered with Python African Tour, working with local organisers and fellow trainers. I co-taught Python and Django in Dakar, Senegal, and led the absolute-beginner group at the African University of Science and Technology in Abuja, Nigeria.
My beginner material wasn't quite beginning at the beginning. I adapted it with Turtle graphics and a Hangman game so learners had something concrete to make and change. The Python 2 tutorial shows how the course introduced functions, loops, and objects. Its examples have not been updated for Python 3.
Ultrasound guidance
At 4Catalyzer I worked with doctors and product teams on guidance intended to help non-experts acquire diagnostic-quality ultrasound images. I customized a U-Net and worked on data acquisition and annotation systems.
Software you can use
Palladium
Palladium is an open-source framework I co-developed with Otto Group BI colleagues to train and serve predictive models.
Writing
- 2014Using convolutional neural nets to detect facial keypoints tutorial
A hands-on introduction with faces as training data.
- 2024How to run Python software that is twelve years old
Running this blog’s generator again with Docker.
- 2025An Emacs mode for a shitty coding agent
The interface complaints that started the project.
Contact
daniel.nouri@gmail.com
Here's my CV and PGP public key. For encrypted email, see the Email Self-Defense Guide.