Simon Bührer

Simon Bührer

MSc student at ETH Zürich working on differentiable logic gate networks, sequence models, and learning systems that run on tight hardware budgets.

I study electrical engineering and information technology at ETH Zürich, with research at the intersection of machine learning and hardware. My recent work centres on differentiable Boolean computation: training neural networks whose primitives are logic gates and lookup tables rather than continuous MACs, so that the resulting models map cleanly to FPGAs and other low-energy substrates.

Outside of that, I have written about transformer architectures for multivariate time-series classification, the role of replay sampling in catastrophic forgetting, and automata-inspired RNNs that can perform exact arithmetic.

Research interests

  • Differentiable logic gate networks and FPGA-native neural architectures.
  • Recurrent and transformer-based sequence models, including automata-inspired RNNs for exact computation.
  • Continual learning and replay-based mitigation of catastrophic forgetting.

Experience

  1. 2025 – 2026

    Everllence

    Internship → Werkstudent · Zürich

    Seven-month industry internship followed by a three-month part-time continuation.

  2. 2022 – 2023

    ARIS — Project Prometheus

    Fokusprojekt · Dübendorf

    Bi-liquid rocket engine: design, instrumentation, throttle control. 677 N thrust, reproducible firings.

  3. 2021 – 2022

    ETH Zürich

    Teaching Assistant — Engineering Mechanics

  4. 2020

    Bühler Group

    Internship · London, UK

  5. 2019

    Swiss Armed Forces

    Panzerjägersoldat, Aufklärungskompanie · Thun

Education

  1. 2024 – 2026

    ETH Zürich — MSc Electrical Engineering & Information Technology

  2. 2020 – 2023

    ETH Zürich — BSc Electrical Engineering & Information Technology

  3. 2015 – 2019

    Kantonsschule Kreuzlingen — Gymnasiale Maturität

    Theoretical and Mathematical Physics

Languages

German (native) · English (professional) · French (limited) · Russian (elementary)

Elsewhere