Who am I? Tough question …
In the homepage, you saw the different roles that are important to me: the craft of AI, teaching, and just being.
On another note, my interests in AI, art, cognitive science, and philosophy have an aspect of science, craft, worldview, and deep participation, engagement. Moreover, they are deeply interconnected and I would even say, synoptically integrated.
It is important to me that these conceptual frames fit into a coherent whole and contribute in a practical way towards a good life. When I started the blog in 2017, my work was at the center (metaphorically and literally), but now the golden thread is philosophy as a way of life.
I can’t emphasise enough the importance of different levels of “knowing”: propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory – as it is not enough to know the facts (or have beliefs), but to know how to do something, to have a perspective of the “world” and a sense of participation in whatever you’re engaged in. I mean that we’re agents in different arenas of life, and the sense of meaning comes from an attunement to those arenas. We participate in a course of something, which has impact on the environment, which changes us and how we view and relate to the world, self and others.
Long Story Short
- Graduate of Cybernetics (2017) and Quantitative Economics (2019)
- Did some research in Complex Systems, Agent-Based Modeling, Systems’ Dynamics, and Heterodox Economics, which was lots of fun
- My serious work was at the intersection of Bayesian Statistics and Machine Learning (thesis, dissertation)
- Teaching Data Science (by which I mean Decision Science) at university and private courses. You can check out the key ideas in the course homepage.
- Head of Data Science at AdoreMe Tech, with the firm since 2016
- Lingerie e-commerce in the U.S., with a PAYG, subscription and try-at-home business models
- $250m revenue in 2022, acquired by Victoria’s Secret
- 70 tech people in Bucharest, over 300 employees
- My work involves AI Strategy, Product Management, ML Systems Design 1
- Some typical applications of AI in an e-commerce I contributed to:
- Demand Planning and Inventory Optimization systems to prevent lost sales and excess inventory
- Recommender Systems to help users find relevant, personalized items and bundles
- Marketing optimizations in Acquisition/Advertisement, Engagement, CRM, Merchandising, Pricing and Promotion
- Hobbies:
- Reading about “Philosophy as a Way of Life” & Cognitive Science
- Painting, Hiking, Jazz/Classical/Metal
- Played chess professionally, but that much stress isn’t worth it
Unsurprisingly, there will be lots of painting metaphors when it comes to simplicity, and cognitive science references when talking about ways in which we’re biased and foolish. Chess, of course, inspires analogies of competition, strategy, and tactics to its service.