- In 1999 I graduated from Rostov State University in Russia. I
received training in Math, Statistics, computer languages like Pascal
and C, databases - FoxPro. In the year 2000 I started working for my
family’s business - pharmacy chain “Rostov Green Pharmacy”.
- When I worked in our pharmacies a good part of my job was all about
computers, I installed, tuned and fixed computers and programs.
Administered local networks of computers, printers and modems. At that
time I got my first experience with object oriented language. 1S Company
supplied us with 1C:Bookkeeping - bookkeeping and documenting software
with embedded 1C:Enterprise embedded programming language. My job was
creating and editing forms, bills of sale, invoices and many other
documents and interactive tools. I worked there for thirteen years till
I moved to Canada in 2013.
- In 2013 Oleg Roderick, a bright mathematician and a head of
research, told me about R language and Facebook algorithms which made me
very curious about Data Science. Since then I have been learning on
Coursera. At first R was a hobby for me but with time I developed my R
skills to a level that let me be admitted to Calgary Metabolomics
Research Facility at the University of Calgary as a volunteer. Half a
year later I was offered a position of Research Programmer. My domain
knowledge of Microbiology and Biochemistry was of good help.
- In 2016 my friend and I created a small startup for automatisation
of agriculture. Inicially I did almost everything - worked with Arduino
and Raspberry Pi, sensors and pumps, made a minimum viable product with
one tomato plant and so on. Finally my role narrowed to Machine Learning
part. Using Python and Tensorflow I developed and trained a model for
recognition of pests and diseases of plants by camera shots and video.
My model recognizes five diseases from evaluation part of dataset with
95% accuracy which is great but much more job was waiting to be
done.
- In 2019 Michael Siegert whom I met in the University of Calgary
invited me to participate in Swiss startup Resistell which develops a
method to measure antibiotic resistance of bacteria in two hours instead
of 48 as it is now. Lasers involved and other cool stuff. I was working
with huge files of research data helping Michael to implement
sophisticated algorithms. Using R as it is my weapon of choice.
- In February of 2020 Michael started his own project Hydrell in
Switzerland. It is about making methane gas from waste water using
electricity and bacteria. Unfortunately it was hard to keep the project
running in the pandemic and I left the same year.
- I spent the peak of pandemic home learning new skills on Coursera
and other online educational resources. I participated in Cybera Data
Science fellowship. With three other fellows we helped to develop a
software for optimization of transformative surgery. Such procedures are
often not covered with insurance and people under the gender
reassignment having a lot of stress besides looking for money so I
believe we helped a good cause.
- In 2021 my family and I went to Russia because of some family
issues. I worked a couple of months in the Palace of Youth Art and
Science - former Palace of Pioneers - as a teacher of Robotics and
Programming. Soon I was offered a role of Data Analyst at the largest
Russian auto trader Key Auto headquarters in Department of Internet
Marketing. It was a good time, I was writing R scripts, SQL queries
pulling data from databases, cleaning, transforming and joining - all
what I love. But the war started in 2022 and I left the country.
- Meantime Michael went to the Netherlands and restarted his project
as Hexem there. He does not need me full time as the data heavy stage
not started yet but I work for the project part time. For example I
wrote a couple of applications using R Shiny, installed PostgreSQL
database and made it running on a website.
- In 2022 I decided to go back to my own project in Agritech. I built
a team of four Data Scientists from around the world and we are making a
prototype software to monitor and control crops using Artificial
Intelligence. It is q side project as we all have day jobs and are
looking for investments but everyone in the team is excited and
dedicated to the project. We are using state of the art algorithms and I
strongly believe this time we are going to make something good.