Who am I?
I’m a 4th-year PhD student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and I work on applied machine learning and data science in a project that applies these techniques to the identification of latent training needs of people in the software industry, using publicly available data. Our project aims for the development of methodologies that can be generalisable to any industry that has sufficient digital traces, and in particular the Swiss vocational education and training (VET) system – the funding for my project comes from a Swiss federal body for VET.
My thesis is supervised by Pierre Dillenbourg who heads the CHILI lab and co-supervised by Robert West who heads the Data Science Lab.
If you are looking for my CV or publications, look for the links in the upper right corner. My LinkedIn profile’s link is at the bottom of the page.
What are my skills?
I use the Python programming language on a daily basis, and I am proficient in using the data analysis package Pandas in Python. For handling big data, I am quite experienced with Apache Spark. For machine learning tasks, I usually use scikit-learn, and an assortment of task-specific packages (e.g. tsfresh for time series features). I have some experience in web development in the context of research projects, e.g. to publish a specifically-designed questionnaire, for which I have used Flask in Python.
My background
I was born in Tehran, Iran on June 17th, 1994. I lived in Iran for the first 23 years of my life. As a child, I was into many of the things you would expect: astronomy, video games, etc. I also hated spinach (I love it now, not joking).
I went to middle and high school in the Allameh Helli schools, where I learned to program from an early age (almost 11), and got interested in mathematics and physics, which resulted in my participating in the Physics Olympiad (first the Iranian national competition, and after becoming a medallist in that, the international one in 2012 in Estonia). At the same time, I was becoming increasingly interested in the applications of artificial intelligence (AI). One’s got to admit, it is really cool to be able to have a computer playing chess or identifying car license plates. Yes, at this point my interest was very broad, but I was a high school student, so bear with me.
My interest in AI made me choose Computer Engineering as my major. I received my B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering (specifically Software Engineering) from Sharif University of Technology. It was in my Bachelor’s that I became interested in machine learning specifically, after taking a general AI course, linear algebra and probability courses, and finally a machine learning course. At this point, I knew this was what I wanted to do as my day to day work, in particular the more applied aspects.
I applied for a doctorate to EPFL at the end of my Bachelor’s (given the length of my Bachelor’s program, there was no need for an M.Sc. degree), and received an admission offer, which I gladly took. Coming here, I became more closely acquainted with data science through a project with Robert West (who is now my co-supervisor) and realised that this was specifically the direction I would like to go in. I then took up my current project and thesis with Pierre Dillenbourg, my thesis supervisor, and passed the 1st year candidacy exam which basically was the gateway exam for the continuation of my PhD.
What I do on a daily basis
On a daily basis, I try to make sense of various plots, wonder why my classifier has low precision on the positive class, and read up interesting papers on computational social science and data science in education, among others.
My hobbies
I sing and play the bass guitar (also recently the electric guitar, but my playing is nothing to write home about). I am also generally into video games and movies/series, if time permits (which it usually does not). Now that you’ve read everything so far down, I’d just like to recommend that you watch the HBO series Barry. Just do it.