Houssem Ben Salem

Houssem Ben Salem, MSc

I cut the noise and never stop until it's done.
I like making machines more intelligent and autonomous.
I harness AI agents with the same soft skills I use to manage people.

2021 — present

I came to quantitative finance as a hobby. The hobby became Lumin, an innovative approach at the intersection of crypto trading and frontier AI, built and rebuilt at every layer over five years.

My day job and this hobby are the same craft. Reading the physics behind a metrology measurement uses the same logic as reading the emotion behind a market price: identify the generator, model its influence, engineer for it. The reading reflexes, modelling tools and post-mortem discipline I built at Sylvac have been directly reusable in Lumin. Since 2021 the two trajectories have advanced in parallel, each breakthrough on one side feeding the other.

The first iteration was python trend detection: arithmetic that identified when a chart was moving versus oscillating, producing the structural primitives of price action — bricks, ratios, range regimes, momentum. The primitives combined into deterministic strategies; the strategies refined into signatures, statistical multi-bar configurations validated out-of-sample across four timeframes on Binance perpetual futures. The current and final iteration is a multi-agent reasoning model: LLM specialists that read the market bar by bar and integrate components in context. The intelligence is not in the model but in a wiki — a structured body of externalised knowledge that absorbs every prior phase, in a format an LLM reads natively.

The deliverable is a practitioner's mind downloaded into a wiki. The approach generalises anywhere skilled experts produce value. The white paper has the details.

LUMIN> open terminal LUMIN> white paper

2015 — present

I joined SYLVAC SA in Crissier, Switzerland, as an applied optics engineer building vision metrology systems — optics, illumination, cameras, image processing, motion control. In 2018 I moved to project management, owning end-to-end delivery of optical measurement machines: specs, industrialisation, production handoff. Since 2021 I lead the R&D machines team. My role is to work with the team to push the limits of our domain, making machines more intelligent and more autonomous — embedded agents, adaptive workflows, UX for robots. Machines should and will interact with humans better and more naturally.

Watch the testimonial →

Machine vision · optical metrology · quality control · robotic guidance · automation

2012 — 2015

Before SYLVAC, I was an applied optics engineer at Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence. I worked on metrological machines, optical sensor development, and image processing for precision measurement systems.


Education
2022 — 2024

Applied Data Science: Machine Learning program at the EPFL Extension School. This is where the quantitative finance rabbit hole started.

2010 — 2012

MSc in Microengineering — Photonics and Applied Optics at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Photonics (light guides and lasers), advanced image processing, optical system design.

2007 — 2010

BSc in Microengineering at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Optics, vision systems, mechanics, electronics, software engineering.


About me

I work at the intersection of precision engineering, machine vision, AI, and quantitative systems. My strength is not staying inside one domain but connecting several until they become one solution. I'm an engineer first: every problem reduces to understanding the physics, building the math, writing the code, and shipping it personally — and staying on it longer than most people think is reasonable. I think outside the box, inside the path. Multilingual, fluent in C++ and Python.