Hi, I'm Ekaterina!

"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." — Isaac Asimov, First Law of Robotics

PhD student at Tallinn University researching Human-Computer Interaction, deep learning, and affective computing—teaching machines to understand human emotions.

Before research, I spent years building distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native apps. Functional programming enthusiast who believes elegant code can change how we think about problems.

What I'm Working On

• As Applied Researcher in Microsoft I work on optimizing NDA'ed AI tools for users
• As PhD student, my research topic is related to neuro-symbolic AI, deep learning and deep knowledge tracing. I work as a part of EduHAI research team

Open Source Contributions

Contributor to scikit-learn — the Python machine learning library. Merged PRs include performance improvements to MultiLabelBinarizer and estimator validation checks.

For example:

1. scikit-learn/scikit-learn#12116 — Cache class mapping in MultiLabelBinarizer (performance enhancement)
2. scikit-learn/scikit-learn#7846 — Add check for estimator: parameters not modified by fit
3. scikit-learn/scikit-learn#7553 — Ensure estimator dict is unmodified by predict/transform

Selected Projects

Research & AI

• Hacker News Semantic Search — Semantic search for 38.8M HN items using FAISS & sentence embeddings
• Heartbeat — Remote photoplethysmography: measuring heart rate from facial video
• Google Scholar Save — Export Google Scholar search results to CSV

Developer Tools

• GitKot — TikTok-style interface to explore GitHub repositories
• Podcast Whisperer — Making podcasts available in multiple languages
• Azure Terraform — Hetzner cloud automation with Terraform

Always Tinkering

Elixir experiments • LeetCode solutions • and 176+ more repos

Let's Connect