Hi, my name is Armin Bagrat Stepanyan (different spellings are just vestigial indicator of Latvian rich case structure).

I’m the cofounder of recurse.ml. There I’m building two things:

  1. Machine learning models for automating boring software engineering tasks in large codebases.
  2. A team that builds (1.).

Before that, I was a NLP Research Engineer at an edtech startup, Boclips. There I was the second member of the data science team. I built a video recommendation system, improved search, and led the development of a demo deployment pipeline.

I have obtained MPhil with distinction from University of Cambridge by building the first GNN for predicting edges in DAGs. I used it to create a multilingual model for finding the minimum number of prerequisites required for a human to learn a topic. I was supervised by Ekaterina Kochmar and highly recommend her as a supervisor if you’re interested in working at the intersection of NLP and education.

I was also an associate lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, where I taught Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence together with George Wilson.

My favourite thing about artificial intelligence is the inherent interdisciplinarity of the field, this also happens to be the theme of my podcast de Dicto (YouTube, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher). My least favourite thing about the field is the hype, hence the low hype associated with the show…

I’ve earned a First Class BSc Hons from University of Manchester in Artificial Intelligence. During my studies I had the pleasure to research explainable approaches to commonsense reasoning under the supervision of André Freitas, leading to the publication – Identifying and Explaining Discriminative Attributes, (EMNLP), Hong Kong, 2019.

Fun fact: I’ve earned a US High School Diploma, without ever stepping foot on the US soil.

And of course, you wouldn’t be the first to point out that my middle name sounds an awful lot like a common RPG design problem.