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• After the acquisition by Taboola, my main objective is to figure out (1) the best way of co-operation between my team of 3 machine learning researchers and engineers and the company's algorithms department and other teams; (2) the best way to make impact in this new setting.
• Highlights of my team's contributions include
  • (a) Getting back to publishing scientific work after a few years of hiatus.
  • (b) By extending our production deep learning framework and improving Gravity's CTR/CVR prediction algorithms, we achieved ~10%+10% improvement in key metrics.
  • (c) Designing and productionizing an innovative solution for e-commerce creative generation based on generative AI technology that increases key metrics by ~15%.
  • (d) Providing machine learning expertise whereever it is needed.

Head of Research

• My role as Head of Research was to oversee the research efforts of the company, as well as to conduct my own research. I was also responsible for providing machine learning expertise to any of the ongoing projects of the company.
• Highlights of my work are
  • (a) Creating the GRU4Rec algorithm (family) that improved upon our previous solution by 10-20% in the revenue through recommendations.
  • (b) Laying down the basics of our CTR/CVR prediction framework that contributed to the success of our co-operation with Taboola that eventually led to the acquisition of Gravity R&D by Taboola.
  • (c) Maintaining and increasing the company's renown in the scientific community via high quality published research, event organization, tutorials, and presenting at meetups and other invited talks.
  • (d) Optimizing off-the-shelf deep learning frameworks with custom CUDA operators achieving up to 100x speed up for certain operations.

Leader of the Deep Learning Team

• My role was to build up and lead a new team focusing on improving our deep learning based recommender solutions.
• I built and managed a team of 2 machine learning engineers.
  • My team completely overhauled our production deep learning training and inference framework, improving its flexibility, increasing its efficiency, and extending its feature set.

Leader of the Data Mining Team

• My role, as the leader of the data science team, was to oversee all data science related tasks in the company.
• I built and managed a team of 3 data scientists. My team
  • (a) applied my research results in the production system
  • (b) significantly improved data infrastructure of the company
  • (c) performed fine tuning during POCs, so that the company has never lost a single A/B test against its competitors
  • Beside these achievements, we upheld a healthy work-life balance in the team and that all members of my team enjoyed their time spent there.

Data Mining Researcher

• My main responsibilities, as a data mining researcher, were researching new recommender algorithms, putting algorithms into production, analyzing user behavior data, and fine tuning our recommendation logic.
• Researched context-aware factorization methods for implicit feedback data.
• Core member of the EU FP7 funded CrowdRec research project (2013-2016).

Visiting Researcher

• Research collaboration between Gravity R&D & Telefónica I+D in the CrowdRec project.
• Laid the foundations of GRU4Rec.

Individual Researcher

• Working on the ShiftTree algorithm.
• I was affiliated with the university research group, DmLab.

PhD candidate

• Data Science and Content Technologies Laboratory (DCLab)
• Summa cum laude Ph.D. (30 June 2016)

PhD studies

• Computer Sciences Doctorate School
• Intelligent Systems Group

MSc

• Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics
• Conputer Science and Engineering
• Graduated with highest honors (21 June 2011)

BSc

• Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics
• Conputer Science and Engineering
• Graduated with highest honors (08 January 2009)