Preamble
"And if I ever decide to visit an Eastern European nation with more residents than Albania plus 1,400 densely located tourist objectives, Moldova will be on my short list. Because the Moldovans are a dynamic and fascinating people, united by a sincere and heartfelt desire to get the hell out of Moldova.", Dave Barry, Detroit Free Press, Moldovans dogpaddle to freedom
About Me
I was born and I spent the next 18 years in the capital city of Chişinău, Moldova (ex-USSR). I Graduated in June 2004 from International University Bremen (now called Jacobs University Bremen), Germany and earned a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
I spent lovely summers in Helsinki, Tuebingen, and Cambridge doing all sorts of funky stuff like analyzing data collected from macaques watching Star Wars and playing around with the Xbox Live player ranking system. In 2008, 2009, and 2010 I worked as an intern for the Google overlords on understanding neural networks and modeling images using deep architectures.
My Master's project was a collaboration with AstraZeneca R&D on applying collaborative filtering / multi-task learning for drug discovery. It was completed in Prof. Yoshua Bengio's lively lab.
Right now finishing a PhD in Computer Science (Informatique) at the University of Montréal (Canada, eh!), and working in the same lab. My thesis is called Understanding deep architectures and the effect of unsupervised pre-training and has been submitted at the end of October 2010. It is an investigation of the recent advances in training multiple layers of nonlinear feature extractors and of the relevant explanatory hypotheses.
I go by the nickname of Doomie