My Story

I was born in the former Soviet Union, and came to Canada with my family after its demise. I grew up in Toronto, where I learned French language and pursued the International Baccalaureate diploma. I then pursued post-secondary studies in Language Science, completing a Bachelors in Linguistics and Natural Language Processing at Université Paris III (2007-2010). I subsequently endeavored to delve deeper into understanding the intersection between human and machine learning, following up with a Master’s degree in Cognitive Science at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris (2010-2012). Finally, I completed a Ph.D. in Cognitive Computing at UQÀAM (2012-2017), during which I studied the potential of Artificial Intelligence in improving education.

After my Ph.D, I spent two years workign in industry research, first at Nuance Communications (2017-2018) and Morgan Stanley (2018-2019). In both of these positions, I led research projects applying Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to open problems such as question answering, natural language understanding, and sentiment analysis. During this time, I learned a lot about the ‘real world’ of research outside of academia, mastered git, scrums and agile development.

Since 2019, I have been a postdoctoral scholar at Mila AI Institute, working on AI for Humanity projects that apply Machine Learning to problems in climate change, health and education. I have also been pursuing several side projects, notably with the United Nations Global Pulse, where I helped develop a dashboard for tracking COVID-19 disinformation on the radio and HuggingFace, where I am contributing to the Big Science project, co-chairing the carbon footprint working group and supporting efforts to develop tools for analyzing datasets and models.

My goal in research is to contribute towards understanding the data and techniques used for developing Machine Learning approaches, as well as to contribute to the growing field of ‘AI for Good’, applying AI to high-impact societal problems like climate change, health, education, and humanitarian response. If you want to work with me on any of these projects, please reach out!

For my full CV, see here