Pascal Sager

Work at ZHAW

Position

PhD Student | Head of AI Demonstrators

Focus

AI, Deep Learning, World Models, Robotics

Teaching

• Lab Assistant Artificial Intelligence 1 (BSc.)
• Lab Assistant Artificial Intelligence (MAS)
• Lead Lab Machine Learning and Data Mining (BSc.)

Experience

• Co-Founder
  Binabik AI
  01 / 2026 - today
• Member of the Board: Sustainable Impact Program
  Zurich University of Applied Sciences
  08 / 2023 - today
• Senior Data Scientist
  AlpineAI AG
  08 / 2023 - 12 / 2024
• Head of GPU Infrastructure and AI Demonstrators
  Zurich University of Applied Sciences
  07 / 2022 - 08 / 2023
• Scientific Assistant at Centre for AI
  Zurich University of Applied Sciences
  09 / 2020 - 05 / 2022
• Software Engineer
  Spühl GmbH
  09 / 2018 - 09 / 2020
• Software Engineer PLC
  Hardinge Europe
  07 / 2015 - 08 / 2017
• Hardware Design Engineer
  Spühl GmbH
  08 / 2013 - 07 / 2015
• Apprenticeship Automation Engineering
  Spühl GmbH
  08 / 2009 - 07 / 2013

Education and Continuing education

Education

• Master of Science / Data Science
  Zurich University of Applied Sciences
  08 / 2020 - 08 / 2023
• Bachelor of Science / Computer Science
  Zurich University of Applied Sciences
  08 / 2017 - 07 / 2020
• Advanced Federal Diploma of Higher Education (ISCED 6) / Electrical Engineering
  ZBW - Centre for Continuing Vocational Education and Training
  08 / 2013 - 07 / 2016
• Automation Engineer EFZ / Automation
  GBS Vocational and Further Training Centre St. Gallen
  08 / 2009 - 07 / 2013

Network

Membership of networks

• Digital Futures Lab
• CLAIRE Rising Researchers Network
• Datalab, the ZHAW Data Science Laboratory
• CLAIRE, the Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe
• Data Innovation Alliance

ORCID digital identifier

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8084-2317

Social media

LinkedIn

Projects

• Avatar Demonstrator: VR Control for Humanoid Robots / Deputy project leader / ongoing
• Learning World Models through Actionable Representation for Next-Generation AI / Project leader / ongoing
• Talking Bots: Interactive Voice Interface for Humanoid Robots in Networking Events / Deputy project leader / completed
• Stability of self-organizing net fragments as inductive bias for next-generation deep learning / Team member / completed
• Machine Learning for Body Composition Analysis / Deputy project leader / completed
• AUTODIDACT – Automated Video Data Annotation to Empower the ICU Cockpit Platform for Clinical Decision Support / Team member / completed
• RealScore – Scanning of Real-World Sheet Music for a Digital Music Stand / Team member / completed
• Visual Food Waste Analysis for Sustainable Kitchens / Team member / completed

Publications

Articles in scientific journal, peer-reviewed

• Sager, P. J., Meyer, B., Yan, P., von Wartburg-Kottler, R., Etaiwi, L., Enayati, A., Nobel, G., Abdulkadir, A., Grewe, B. F., & Stadelmann, T. (2026). A comprehensive survey of agents for computer use : foundations, challenges, and future directions. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 85(34). https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.1.19490
• Sager, P. J., Deriu, J. M., Grewe, B. F., Stadelmann, T., & von der Malsburg, C. (2026). The cooperative network architecture : learning structured networks as representation of sensory patterns. Neural Computation. https://doi.org/10.1162/neco.a.1505
• Tuggener, L., Emberger, R., Ghosh, A., Sager, P., Satyawan, Y. P., Montoya, J., Goldschagg, S., Seibold, F., Gut, U., Ackermann, P., Schmidhuber, J., & Stadelmann, T. (2024). Real world music object recognition. Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 7(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.5334/tismir.157
• Sager, P., Salzmann, S., Burn, F., & Stadelmann, T. (2022). Unsupervised domain adaptation for vertebrae detection and identification in 3D CT volumes using a domain sanity loss. Journal of Imaging, 8(8), 222. https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging8080222

Written conference contributions, peer-reviewed

• Sager, P., Kamaraj, A., Grewe, B. F., & Stadelmann, T. (2025). Deep retrieval at CheckThat! 2025 : identifying scientific papers from implicit social media mentions via hybrid retrieval and re-ranking [Conference paper]. In G. Faggioli, N. Ferro, P. Rosso, & D. Spina (Eds.), Working Notes of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2025) (pp. 1141–1155). CEUR Workshop Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-33534
• Meyer, B., Sager, P., Abdulkadir, A., Grewe, B. F., Schuetz, P., Stadelmann, T., & Burn, F. (2025). Hounsfield unit ranges as inductive bias for intra-clinical learning of data-efficient CT segmentation models [Conference paper]. 2025 IEEE Swiss Conference on Data Science (SDS), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1109/SDS66131.2025.00008
• Saponati, M., Sager, P., Aceituno, P. V., Stadelmann, T., & Grewe, B. (2025). The underlying structures of self-attention : symmetry, directionality, and emergent dynamics in Transformer training [Conference paper]. In A. Singh, M. Fazel, D. Hsu, S. Lacoste-Julien, F. Berkenkamp, T. Maharaj, K. Wagstaff, & J. Zhu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 52958–52994). Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-33652
• Tuggener, L., Sager, P., Taoudi-Benchekroun, Y., Grewe, B. F., & Stadelmann, T. (2024, September 18). So you want your private LLM at home? : a survey and benchmark of methods for efficient GPTs. 2024 11th IEEE Swiss Conference on Data Science (SDS). https://doi.org/10.1109/SDS60720.2024.00036
• Simmler, N., Sager, P., Andermatt, P., Chavarriaga, R., Schilling, F.-P., Rosenthal, M., & Stadelmann, T. (2021). A survey of un-, weakly-, and semi-supervised learning methods for noisy, missing and partial labels in industrial vision applications [Conference paper]. Proceedings of the 8th SDS, 26–31. https://doi.org/10.1109/SDS51136.2021.00012

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