Denny Schaedig, founder
Denny Schaedig is a machine learning engineer and the founder of Rocky Mountain Digerati, the small Colorado company behind the open snowpack dataset and AvAI. He's a Colorado native based in Summit County, and a PSIA-certified ski instructor. More about him and his other work is on his personal website.
He came to machine learning through neuroscience. While earning a B.A. in Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder, he studied how the brain learns and forms memories, and coursework in computer science and models of cognition drew him toward AI. He went on to apply deep learning to brain-imaging data and works as a NeuroImaging Engineer at Washington University in St. Louis.
Where the project started
The snowpack work began as his capstone for an M.S. in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Colorado State University Global, completed in 2025. The question was whether generative AI could help with avalanche-risk prediction. There was no open imagery of the snowpack to learn from, so he dug the snowpits himself. Over two winters he collected 4,040 image samples from seven snowpits, using a mini-coring method he developed.
That collection became the Rocky Mountain Snowpack dataset, published openly on Hugging Face. The generative models trained on it, snowGAN, became the starting point for the avalanche-risk research that continues today.
What it grew into
Rocky Mountain Digerati grew out of the capstone as an independent applied-ML lab. Alongside the dataset and models, it builds AvAI, a beta backcountry safety companion app whose check-out/check-in feature alerts your emergency contact if you don't check in on time. The avalanche-risk model is still research, not something the app provides yet.
The dataset grows through fieldwork, and you can help: sign up to collect snowpack data.
Get in touch
Email dennys@rmdig.ai, visit dennyschaedig.com, or find the open-source work on GitHub and Hugging Face.