About

Who Am I?

Senior machine learning engineer with a software engineering background (7+ years of experience) and a solid understanding of data science. Bachelors in Computer Science from University of Kansas. Have a software patent in accessibility. Contribute to open source projects such as Tensorflow. Have a wide range of data science projects in portfolio including NLP, EEG brain scan modeling, recommender systems, and facial recognition. Have worked on software that scales to millions of users at salesforce.com. Writer on technical topics for Analytics Vidhya, DataDrivenInvestor.com, and Medium. Aim to apply cutting edge research to real world applications that work every time. Excited to tackle big challenges and invent the future.

Machine Learning

Software Engineer

Technical Writer

Real Estate Investor

Read

Projects

Mar 28, 2020 | Project | 171

Reading the Brain with Machine Learning

I train an RNN to analyze EEG data from the Muse headband and automatically detect the Reward Positivity Event Related Potential, in real time.

Feb 22, 2020 | Project | 103

DIY Brain Research: Cheap, Quality EEG Data

Replicated a paper which uses EEG data from the Muse headband to detect Event Related Potentials (ERP's)

Oct 18, 2019 | Collaboration | 84

Threatening Tweets Detector

Chicago Gang Violence Threatening Tweets Classifier with Omdena

Aug 2, 2019 | Competiton | 96

Recommender System for Jokes

Won second place in data science competition for recommending jokes based on user preferences

2010 | Project | 121

Facial Recognition Login System

Face detection and face recognition to be used for login and authentication

2006 | Agent | 84

Scrabble AI

Scrabble AI that can play against humans for the online scrabble site Quadplex.com

Experience

Work Experience

Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Change Healthcare 01-2021 - Present

Lead a team which deploys ML/AI models to production in AWS with tools written in Python. Products include reading medical charts with OCR and NLP, separating out medical encounters, and recognizing insurance codes from text. Created reusable infrastructure for deploying models, monitoring logs, secure API's, and alerting if there is a problem, which made the organization more efficient and iterate faster.

Machine Learning Engineer at eBay 06-2020 - 12-2020

Combining data science with software engineering to provide high-quality automated customer service. Trained neural networks, including fine tuning BERT. Implemented algorithms from research papers.

Machine Learning Engineer at Omdena 08-2019 – 03-2020

Developed an NLP model to classify threatening tweets from high-crime areas. Deployed this machine learning model to AWS to automate tweet classification in real time, which led to the company winning a contract with the Delaware Department of Transportation.

Software Engineer at Salesforce.com 02-2011 – 04-2017

Full stack developer working with Javascript/CSS in the frontend, Java and PL/SQL on the backend, and API’s to bridge the gap. Helped invent new technology which resulted in U.S. Patent No. 10,579,222. “Keyboard access to hover functionality.” It helps people with disabilities interact more easily with modern user interfaces. Improved the mobile app experience for iOS and Android and increased adoption by 60%. Improved performance of integration with Twitter API which reduced API calls by 75%, saving money. Enhanced security of customer data by implementing encryption and closing vulnerabilities, increasing customer trust and retention.

Software Engineer in Test at Perceptive Software 01-2011 – 09-2011

Implemented an automated testing framework to catch bugs earlier and increase code quality. Trained non-programmer QA team how to write tests to make them more productive. Enhanced memory management by implementing an automatic memory leak detector as part of the build process.

Other Experience

IBM Improved quality of product through integration and stress testing
KU Geological Survey Worked on software which predicts what materials are underground using seismic data for geophysicists
Future Delivery Web development for a social network
Quadplex Developed a Scrabble AI that plays against human players online
What I do?

Activities

Open Source Contributor

I have contributed code to Tensorflow along with various personal projects.

Omdena Mentor

Omdena is a social enterprise which brings data scientist volunteers from around the world to use AI for good and gain experience by working on real world problems. I mentor junior data scientists.

Volunteer

Data Science Discussion Group

Lead a weekly data science discussion group where we read research papers and talk about them

Languages

English:native
Bulgarian:native
French:conversational
Spanish:basic
Read

Recent Articles

Feb 5, 2020 | Programming | 121

Coding the Impossible: Palindrome Detector with a Regular Expressions

This Stack Overflow question asks how to check if a string is a palindrome using regular expressions. The top answer with 147 upvotes points out that it is impossible. Let's do it anyway.

Oct 4, 2019 | Personal Growth | 88

How to Develop Passion

A lot of people have this idea that a passion is something you’re born with or is like a spirit that possesses your body and magically makes you love painting. I don’t think that’s a healthy or accurate way to look at it.

Aug 5, 2019 | Philosophy | 256

Science and Skepticism vs Cynicism

The difference between skepticism and cynicism. Skepticism is an important part of science. However, when skepticism crosses the line into cynicism, it becomes toxic.

Jul 23, 2019 | Life | 132

6 Life Lessons from Chess

Take the Initiative. In Chess, when you attack your opponent’s pieces or create a threat and force them to respond to it, that’s called having the initiative. Which side would you rather be on in life?

Apr 20, 2020 | Chess | 134

Knight Mastery: Fastest Path to Any Square with the Knight

In this study I’ll talk about how the knight moves on an open board. You’ll learn how to quickly figure out how to get to any target square in the minimum number of moves.

Get in Touch

Contact

Don't hesitate to reach out if you want to collaborate on a project or just to say hi. I love talking to like-minded people.