I had a great misfortune to be born in the same year as Justin Bieber which makes me just old enough to remember original Pokemon. In hindsight I’ve bluffed my way through life, often taking a different perspective on what success is than most people. Some of my greatest achievements, by my own standard mind you, include:

  • making a cheesecake at the age of 7
  • never dreaming of becoming an astronaut [1]
  • getting an outstanding high-school degree with some of the highest absence-rate in recorded history
  • getting a college degree in computer science whilst trying to study biology

My minor superpower is gravitating towards the most expensive item in any given store and my spirit animal is a house cat [2].

“Professional”

I’ve spent some time interning at Microsoft Azure which earned me a patent and enough money for a bicycle [3] and a camera. I also used to work as a research assistant [4] at PRO Unlimited (I can’t legally say that I worked for Facebook AI Research), under supervision of Professor Lorenzo Torresani (who does work for Facebook AI Research).

I’ve successfully completed a PhD under a watchful eye of Andrew Zisserman in the Very Good Group at Oxford, while moonlighting as a “consultant” [5] with outstanding people of Quansight. During my PhD, I pretended to be useful in Google, interning for my former intern. After this, I went on to learn how to train really large multimodal language models with some of the smartest people in the world. Today, I’m using the acquired knowledge to think about how to model complex hidden markov processes.

Lists

Good writing is not one of my virtues, but I love making lists, so here are some (mildly) interesting facts about me:

  • 1995: swam for the first time
  • got my first personal computer early on and had an unfortunate experience of having Windows ME installed on it
  • 2007: won my first medal at an age-group national championship
  • 2008: won my first age-group national championship
  • 2009: got my first real camera [6]
  • 2010: visited my second continent
  • 2012: learned how to dance
  • 2014: went to college in the US
  • 2014: read the entire Sandman series in less than a week
  • 2014: made this blog
  • 2015: decided not to drink for a year
  • 2017: forgot how to dance
  • 2017: published a paper
  • 2017: participated in a cycling race
  • 2018: made it through 4 years at Dartmouth and have a paper to prove it
  • 2019: was deported from the US
  • 2019: visited a third continent
  • 2020: living through a COVID19 pandemic
  • 2020: decided that earning money is overrated and went back to even posher school
  • 2023: visited my fourth continent
  • 2024: was re-imported to the US
  • 2024: adopted “an” dog
  • 2025: finished my posh degree, and figuring out adulting for the second time
  • 2026: visited a 5th continent

And some things that nobody cares about but you can’t help but knowing them now:

  • in the period from 2005 to 2019, I’ve done on average 200 flip-turns a day
  • I own more cameras than I care to admit. Their average age is 28 years
  • I read comic strips daily; selected favourites are: Frazz, Garfield, Pearls Before Swine, xkcd, Oglaf, Foxtrot (both classics and regular issues), Calvin & Hobbes

[1] Like most kids, I wanted to be a different thing every week and according to my grandma, astronaut was never one of them. For some reason, I wanted to be a tram driver for quite a long time

[2] I can sleep 18 hours a day, have zero attention span, and am on a good day a nuisance [7]

[3] They pay really well, but bicycles are expensive

[4] My manager tried to hire me as a postdoctoral researcher, but was met with some logistical difficulties as apparently you have to be a doctor to do so.

[5] Actual consultants tend to get upset by me saying I was a consultant which makes it even more fun to do so, which probably tells you something about me

[6] Which escalated quickly

[7] Mostly put here due to my love of footnotes and in a hope that you might have forgotten how (or why) you got here in the first place