Martin Monsch is a hobbit. Growing up in the gardens of Eglisau and the mountain world of Davos, he has settled down in the Lake-town of Zurich. Middle-earth seemed familiar to him from his first immersion—which was perhaps no coincidence—and because riddles and treasures of inspiration have always magically attracted him, the project Switzerland in Tolkien’s Middle-earth was born a few winters ago.

In real life, Martin is a lawyer who has evolved into a data scientist in the last few years. Machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) are topics that particularly fascinate him. He dealt with technical innovations and automation processes during his Ph.D. at the University of Zurich and later as a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich. And he follows with fascination, but also with concern, the developments in the field of artificial intelligence.

Besides his travels to Middle-earth and his activities as a machine teacher, Martin is planning his first novel, in which he will take his readers into a world both familiar and foreign. It is a historical fiction work that could also suit the tastes of fantasy fans, nature lovers, and adventurers. But that is all he is currently revealing—or can perhaps anything be inferred from the fact that he writes about himself in the third person?—If you are interested, please let me know below. It would make me very happy!