Company:Cledar

Cledar Llc.

Type	Limited liability company
Industry	Software
Founded	July 9, 2009 (2009-07-09)
Founder	Hubert Niewiadomski Piotr Nyczyk
Headquarters	Wieliczka, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Hubert Niewiadomski, CEO and Co-founder Piotr Nyczyk, CTO and Co-founder
Services	End-to-end software development Data management Data analytics Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Cloud computing SaaS systems
Number of employees	40+ (2022)
Website	www.cledar.com

Cledar is a Polish-owned custom software development company specializing in data management and analytics with experience working with public cloud, on-premises infrastructure and hybrid cloud solutions. The company provides businesses and public organizations with advanced analytics tools based on artificial intelligence and data science technology. Cledar operates internationally and provides technology solutions to clients in the areas of data infrastructure, machine learning application development, and data modeling and visualization. As of 2022, the company has two offices located in Poland, in Wieliczka near Kraków, and in the United States, San Francisco Bay Area.

The majority of Cledar employees have a scientific background, specializing in domains like deep learning, audio and video processing, financial modeling, industrial and commercial process monitoring, and data mining. Cledar was founded in 2009 by Piotr Nyczyk, Hubert Niewiadomski and several other engineers from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). During their time at CERN, the founding members of Cledar contributed to a variety of significant projects and initiatives, including the development of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, as well as the discovery of a new particle (hadron), called an Odderon. They coordinated and implemented projects aimed at creating solutions to help capture, unify, and structure petabytes of data from scientific projects to help CERN physicists optimize their work and get access to the research findings of other CERN physics teams.

CERN experience

The establishment of Cledar in June 2009 was preceded by many years spent by its founders at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. Hubert Niewiadomski and Piotr Nyczyk both worked as engineers on data-related solutions to help CERN physicists better access and process data related to the Large Hadron Collider and its launch in 2008. In 2002, Piotr joined the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet (part of the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków) to work on the recently started “Cross Grid” project”. After years at CERN, Piotr decided to start running Cledar as a company.

In 2009, Hubert became Deputy Data Analysis Coordinator for the TOTEM experiment. In 2015, he became the full-time CEO of Cledar and took responsibility for ML projects, team building.

Hubert Niewiadomski

Hubert Niewiadomski is the Chief Executive Officer of Cledar. Serving in this role since 2015, Hubert advise on technologies with a focus on data analytics, data science, and software development. As a computer scientist with a background in data analytics and machine learning, Hubert joined CERN (TOTEM experiment) in 2003. He contributed to designing, building, and deploying algorithms and data analytics software that were used to find extremely rare events amid overwhelming background noise. During his time at CERN, Hubert served as Deputy Data Analytics Coordinator and Lead Software Engineer. Since the foundation of Cledar, Hubert has focused on machine learning, data acquisition, data infrastructure, and audio and video processing. He is a key contributor to 95 papers, has 4,500 citations and an h-index of 27.

Hubert’s professional achievements include:

• Algorithms, machine learning models and statistical procedures that allowed for world-class improvements in data analytics of proton-proton scattering and for measurements with unprecedented precision. This has been achieved with algorithmic elimination of the impact of external conditions such as:
  1. LHC colliding positions
  2. Imperfections of magnetic fields
  3. Efficient tagging of key physics events among billions of data record noise
  4. Improvements to speed of Monte Carlo simulations;
• Discovery of the Glueball particle – a new state of matter;
• Most precise measurements of elastic scattering and proton diffractive structure;
• Data processing and analytics software for the TOTEM experiment at CERN;
• ULTRA – machine learning platform for data analytics and forecasting.

Hubert Niewiadomski holds a PhD from the University of Manchester, UK. Prior to his PhD, he obtained a Master's degree from the University of Warsaw, Poland, having graduated from the same institution in Engineering in Computer Science in 2003.

Piotr Nyczyk

Piotr Nyczyk is the Chief Technology Officer at Cledar. He advises on technology management and knowledge acquisition, specializing in software architecture, large-scale computing, distributed computing, big data storage, cloud technologies, communication protocols, video streaming, databases, networking, and federated authentication. Piotr served as a Chief Architect, Team Leader, and Software Engineer at CERN, where he managed the implementation of Service Availability Monitoring and the operations management system for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), the largest massively distributed computing grid in the world.

Piotr's professional achievements include:

• Deploying and operating the first academic computing cluster in Central and Eastern Europe connected to the WLCG Grid;
• Laying the foundations for and advancing the operational model of the Worldwide LCG infrastructure, enabling reliable operations of large-scale scientific computations;
• Developing a novel technique of encoding remote desktop graphical data streams and filing a patent application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“System and method for multistage optimized jpeg output”, provisional patent № US20120218292A1), which was subsequently cited by leading technology companies, including Microsoft and Samsung.

Piotr Nyczyk received his Master's degree in computer science in 2002 from the AGH University of Science and Technology, Kraków, Poland. He has also published several papers.

Business areas

Cledar identifies 3 main areas of its international business operations:

1. Building and maintaining comprehensive data infrastructure. The company delivers data-driven software in order to optimize operations and support clients in managing data collected both remotely or from deployed devices, video or imaging from camera feeds, or aggregated multiple data-only APIs. Projects implemented in this area include the use of:
   • End-to-end optimized data pipelines with queueing and retention
   • Multi-frequency data streams ingestion and merging
   • Distributed and highly parallelized filtering and processing
   • Media processing pipelines with plugged-in cascading artificial intelligence algorithms;
2. Machine learning application development. Cledar builds ML-based software to help interpret, categorize, and identify patterns and trends in unstructured data such as images, video, audio or text documents. For training algorithms and using data science, the company uses the following tools:
   • Python, SciPy, NumPy, Scikit-learn, PyTorch, Pandas, XGBoost, Tensorflow, Keras
   • K-means, k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), Mean-shift, density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), EM using GMM, hierarchical clustering (HAC)
   • Principle component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA), singular value decomposition (SVD), k-d trees
   • Entropy, regression, multivariate regression, deep learning, convolutional neural networks (CNN), singular spectrum analysis;
3. Data modeling and data visualization. In order to make data understandable, meaningful and useful for users, Cledar’s specialists use these visualization techniques and technologies:
   • Relational models, no-SQL representations, network and graph models, unstructured data, spatial and geographic models
   • Star and snowflake schemas, extract-transform-load (ETL) transformations, optimizations for data mining and online analytical processing (OLAP)
   • Training and testing data sets, data sampling, dimensionality reduction, anonymization, Monte Carlo simulations
   • Network visualization (clusters, connections between clusters, flows, influential nodes, outliers), plots and charts (Highcharts, D3, FusionCharts), geographic visualizations.

Workplace and Cledar's values

Cledar places a strong emphasis on the scientific foundation of its practices. Founded and led by former CERN scientists, the company combines data science and software development capabilities to help organizations tackle complex challenges. There are 3 main principles that Cledar employees – researchers, scientists, engineers and developers – follow in their daily work:

1. Adopt a “bird’s eye” view. The company strives to adopt a holistic view of every challenge. With this view, Cledar’s experts can anticipate challenges, identify and maximize opportunities, and deliver appropriate solutions;
2. Question the fundamentals. Cledar promotes an open-minded organizational culture, as well as the exploration of new ideas and experimentation, even in those areas where proven methods already exist;
3. Seek expert opinion. At Cledar, collaboration between domains and specializations is key. This helps its employees enjoy the benefit of multiple perspectives, cross-pollination of ideas, and healthy challenging of assumptions.

As of June 2022, the company had over 40 employees. The 4-stage recruitment process at Cledar consists of an HR interview, tech interview, a meeting with the CEO and/or CTO, and a feedback session. The company offers its employees benefits such as: funding for certification, participation in industry events, flexible working hours, private health insurance, English classes with native speakers, access to resources supporting professional development, high-quality equipment, and a pet-friendly environment.

External links

Official website