Autobiography

In case you would like to know more about me, here is a brief account of my path so far.

Early years

I was born in 1998 in Moscow, Russia. Both of my parents come from an engineering background. After studying for the first 7 years in a regular district school (no. 1416), I transferred to Lyceum no. 1535, the top-1 school in Moscow at that time. The entrance exams were pretty challenging, that’s for sure. :) That decision was a turning point in my life: a need to commute to school every day (that was taking about an hour by subway) as well as a significant academic load forced me to adopt a relatively responsible and competitive mindset.

I graduated from the Physics and Mathematics class of the 1535 Lyceum in 2016 with a ~3.9 GPA (school diploma with honors). After passing the state exams, I enrolled at the Physics Department of Moscow State University. This choice was natural for me since for the last two years of school I was specializing in physics. I was quite fascinated by the natural sciences as well: slowly acquiring more and more objective knowledge about the world was extremely exciting.

University years: bachelor's degree

At the Department of Physics of Moscow State University, the first two years of the bachelor’s degree consist of general courses (general physics, calculus, linear algebra, complex analysis, etc.). At that time I started to lean more towards the mathematics courses: even though I enjoyed learning physics, the rigor and logic of maths proved to be even more engaging for me. It was also motivated by some of the best professors I have ever had: I am immensely grateful to my Calculus professor, Andrey Badyin, for unveiling my passion for maths.

I have spent the last two years of my bachelor’s degree at the Chair of General Physics and Wave Processes. This chair is very well-known within the department and has a great reputation. However, my main motivation for going there was a specific laboratory: the Laboratory of mathematical biophysics under the leadership of Professor Y.M. Romanovsky. Under his supervision, I have successfully finished my graduate paper on the molecular dynamics of tubulin microtubules. That was a very important experience for me: to finish this work, I had to establish cooperation between two chairs of my department: Wave Processes and Biophysics. In that regard, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to N.B. Gudimchuk, who became my co-advisor and gave me an immense volume of knowledge on molecular dynamics modeling.

I graduated from Moscow State University in 2021 with an Honours diploma (GPA ~3.8).

Getting into machine learning

While studying at MSU, I decided to find a part-time job to support my living costs and move out of my parents’ house. Being highly interested in science, mathematical modeling, and biophysics, I was searching for an academic position related to those areas. Luckily, I was able to join the Neuromorphic Algorithms Group at the National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute”. That position was almost ideal for me since their focus on neural networks and memristive devices satisfied all my interests at once. However, keeping up with their pace was not easy at first: I had to learn Python (NumPy, TensorFlow/PyTorch) and all the deep learning-related areas (artificial neural networks, spiking neural networks, data preprocessing, model evaluation, etc.) from scratch since my major did not provide any related courses. Nevertheless, with time I managed to gain all the necessary skills and publish a couple of papers in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Neuromorphic Computing fields. All in all, the 3 years that I spend there were priceless in terms of experience for me: entering as a student, I left as a data scientist. For that I am grateful to all my colleagues who supported me, educated me, and were always there for me if I was getting stuck and discouraged.

Master's degree: moving to Taiwan

In 2021, after finishing my bachelor’s degree, I decided to get my master’s degree abroad to get new experience, refine my language skills and broaden my horizons. Taiwan seemed like a great choice: the quality of education there is high, and the terms for overseas students are very attractive. Therefore, I have applied for enrollment at the National Taipei University of Technology, International Master’s Program in Mechanical Engineering and Automation. This program combines AI, engineering, and robotics, which is very fitting considering my physics and AI background. I also applied for the MOE Scholarship, which I was granted along with admission to NTUT. To acquire the funding required for relocation, I started working full-time at Robusta (a digital marketing company in Moscow) as a technical support specialist. This position allowed me to successfully relocate in October 2022. It also gave me valuable experience of working in a commercial IT company.

Current state of affairs

As of today, I am close to finishing my master’s degree. I am also working at the Intelligent Systems Lab under the supervision of Professor Wen-Hui Chen, where I am developing neural network models for autonomous driving applications. So far we have published two papers on the monocular distance estimation topic: one of them was presented at the ICCAS-2022 conference (Busan, Republic of Korea), and another one – published in the Sensors Journal (MDPI).