Verner Vlacic

PhD in applied mathematics with a focus on neural network theory and signal…

Notes10

• Quant employment verification: CONFIRMED. Verner Vlačić held a paid professional role titled 'Quantitative Risk Consultant' at Zanders (zandersgroup.com) in Zurich from Aug 2023 to May 2024, described on his LinkedIn as 'Data scientist in the field of risk management for financial institutions'; his identity is supported by that same verified profile (Dr. sc. ETH Zürich; MSc/BA Cambridge) matching his ETH and Huawei academic record. Zanders is an independent treasury and financial-risk consultancy (Utrecht HQ) that performs quantitative financial risk modelling and model validation for financial institutions, so the employer and role are genuinely quantitative-finance; it is an advisory/consultancy, not an investment bank, asset manager, energy or crypto trading firm, hedge fund or market-maker. No role or internship at a trading firm, hedge fund or investment bank was found. Source is index/LinkedIn-derived, not independent primary-source confirmation of the role.May 2024
• Postdoc Researcher at the Huawei Zurich Research Center (2021-2023), then Senior Researcher at Huawei Switzerland (2024-present), in the Computing Systems Lab working on neural-network theory, signal processing and algebraic programming.Jan 2021
• No evidence was found of any role or internship at a quantitative trading firm, market-maker, hedge fund, investment bank, asset manager, or energy/crypto trading firm - his professional history is academic research plus a single quantitative-risk consultancy engagement.May 2024
• Peer-reviewed publications: 'Affine symmetries and neural network identifiability' (Advances in Mathematics 376, 2021), 'Neural network identifiability for a family of sigmoidal nonlinearities' (Constructive Approximation, 2021, invited) and 'Beurling-type density criteria for system identification' (Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications 29, 2023, with C. Aubel and H. Bölcskei).Jul 2023
• Undergraduate and master's at Cambridge: BA Mathematics 2013-2016 then MMath 2016-2017, before a PhD in Applied Mathematics at ETH Zürich (2017-2020) under Prof. Helmut Bölcskei's Chair for Mathematical Information Science.Jan 2020
• Represented Croatia at the International Mathematical Olympiad 2012 and earned an honourable mention (team-page row: score 277, 49.5%).Jul 2012
• The timeline - a Cambridge mathematics degree, an ETH doctorate in neural-network theory, then a two-year Zanders risk-consulting stint between two Huawei research roles - shows the consulting interlude was bracketed by research positions, i.e. a detour rather than a move into finance, and he returned to research in 2024.Jun 2024
• Listed as a contributor to the Algebraic Programming (ALP) library at the Huawei Zurich Research Center (NOTICE file: 'Verner Vlacic, Huawei Technologies Switzerland AG; 2021-current').Jan 2021
• Co-authored 'The mathematics of adversarial attacks in AI - why deep learning is unstable despite the existence of stable neural networks' with A. Bastounis and A. C. Hansen, connecting his network-identifiability work to the computational-complexity side of machine learning.Jan 2021
• Google Scholar footprint: 187 citations, h-index 6, i10-index 4 - a mid-career academic profile concentrated on neural network identifiability and computational barriers.Jan 2026
• Collaborated with the Huawei Zurich Research Center on a nonlinear spectral clustering algorithm using C++ GraphBLAS (joint work with Dr. Albert-Jan Yzelman and a USI team).Jan 2025
• A Bridgwater summer internship supported his Cambridge computational-imaging work with M. Benning and C.-B. Schönlieb, published as arXiv:1602.01278 (2016) - a research internship, not a finance role.Feb 2016