Professional Experience

Net-Scale Technologies [www.net-scale.com]; Morganville, NJ

July 2008 - December 2008; Researcher

Extended and maintained the codebase of a convolutional neural network package for the DARPA URGENT program (Urban Reasoning and Geospatial Exploitation Technology). URGENT classifies images as objects based on 3D image data acquired through aerial and street-level photography. The team consisted of two members.

• Implemented an extension for finding polygons in neural network output bitmaps using OpenCV, an open source computer vision and computational geometry package
• Wrote a visualization package for 3D pointcloud data.
• Trained and tuned the neural network; wrote reports on test runs; programmed a separate classifier specifically for learning the groundplane
• The legacy codebase used Lush, an in-house dialect of Lisp. I integrated the Lush system with a larger C system used by another DARPA contractor.

Eluciv Knowledge [www.eluciv.com]; Brooklyn, NY

May 2007 - May 2008: Cofounder and Director of Research

Directed machine learning research and development efforts at Eluciv Knowledge, a startup focused on reducing information overload. The initial product was going to be a reader for syndicated (RSS/Atom) feeds, with planned advanced features such as implicit acquisition of user's interests, recommendations using collaborative and content-based filtering, and sorting by personal relevance. The team consisted of three co-founders.

• Led the planning of scaling the adaptive feed reader product, which would scan and store a large number of feeds, and provide specific article recommendations to individual users.
• Researched free and commercial machine learning libraries and clustering packages such as Weka, CLUTO, Carrot2 and Lemur, and evaluated the possibility of adapting them as engines for determining personal relevance.
• Researched parallel and distributed computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Apache Hadoop and Google MapReduce.
• Primary contributor in the development of the product vision, the business plan and the revenue model.
• Designed and developed a prototype content archiver and delivery system using Amazon Web Services (S3, EC2, SimpleDB). The system was written in C and Python.
• Built an alpha version of the product that won a highly sought after YCombinator funding round. Used Ruby on Rails for speed of development.

TCG Secure Zone [www.tcgsecurezone.com]; New York, NY

May 2007 - January 2008: Part-Time Consultant
August 2003 - May 2007: Senior Developer
January 2000 - September 2001: Part-Time Intern

First employee at a company serving top-tier investment banks and other highly regulated large enterprises. Designed and developed the flagship product: a platform for customers to ensure that they remain in compliance with auditing and information access laws and regulations. The platform provides an entitlement and storage engine for confidential electronic documents. It ensures that all user access to documents through email, web applications, and filesystems, goes through a flexible and powerful authorization and reporting layer. The team grew from two to seven members over time.

• Implemented several iterations of the entitlement engine which supported fine-grained and fully versioned access control. The engine ran on JBoss AS, with Hibernate and MySQL providing persistence.
• Implemented several iterations of the UI used for the entitlement engine. In 2000, designed a purely JavaScript-based AJAX framework, and rewrote it to use Java bindings in 2004. Switched to using GWT when it became available so as to reduce maintenance costs.
• Designed, implemented and maintained a set of Citrix Client and Microsoft Office plug-ins that seamlessly incorporated editing and emailing confidential documents into the user's natural workflow.
• Implemented client-specific requirements and integrated the product with clients' in-house infrastructure.
• Supervised testing and performed monthly on-site rollouts.

Education

New York University [www.nyu.edu]; New York, NY

Spring 2005, Fall 2006, Spring 2007: Non-Matriculated Student

Graduate Coursework:
• Natural Language Processing;
• Machine Learning;
• Foundations of Machine Learning;

Fall 1999 - Spring 2003: Bachelor of Arts

Double Major:
• Computer Science - 3.6 GPA
  • Graduated with honors.
  • Competed in the 2000, 2001 and 2002 Greater New York ACM Regional Programming Contest. Team won 3rd place in 2001.
• Philosophy - 3.6 GPA

Personal Projects

amusem.net (2006)

• Cofounded amusem.net, a small web application for creating desktop backgrounds from reproductions of fine artworks.

Stuyvesant High School [www.stuy.edu]; New York, NY

Spring 2006, Spring 2007 - Artificial Intelligence Instructor, Volunteer

• Taught college-level artificial intelligence topics twice a week after school to gifted 12th-graders at my alma mater.

Exe2Cab (1996-1999)

• Created Exe2Cab, a freeware archive format conversion utility, using C.
• Licensed to Winzip in 1998.

Skills

• Programming languages: C/C++, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Clojure
• OS environments: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X
• Development environments: GNU Emacs, Eclipse, Microsoft Visual Studio, IntelliJ IDEA
• SCM and bug tracking: CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Trac, Flyspray
• Fluent in English and Russian
• Conversational in Italian