Doing nothing, merely existing...
Actually, there is meaningful life before the academic degree! :) At this point I did not know what I would like to have as my career path, I did not have apparent love for maths but I was decent at it. One thing I knew for certain is that I was terrible at memorising, while I was pretty good at learning through examples, exercises and practicing skills.
Apart from school during my school years I was involved in basketball, arts (drawing) and live action role-playing (LARP) games. Among these activities I have developed passion for team sports and creativity. That evolved into some of my still most liked hobbies: competitive videogames and anime :)
I accidentally (solely based on the exam scores) got into Applied Linguistics in the Novosibirsk State University (NSU), which was a relatively new program teaching interdisciplinary linguistics. I was decent at it, but it annoyed me at times: the questions that linguistics was addressing sounded too high-level and had little positive impact for the society from my perspective. However, phonetics was quite different from other domains of linguistics because it is grounded in the reality of the manner how people speak and how their vocal cavity is structured.
Apart from the linguistic disciplines, we had coding in Perl and later Python. This is where I had a revelation that this is the activity in which I can see myself doing this all my life. For me coding became like a puzzle: where I try to solve the task (put together a picture) by trial and error (trying to fit different pieces). However, coding is even better than a puzzle because after you assemble it, if you come a year later you will see new issues and by improving the code you will get a new sense of accomplishment.
The above interests have brought me first to psycholinguistics with Ivan Brak of the Research Institute for Experimental and Clinical Medicine and then to computational linguistics with Ivan Bondarenko now of NSU. I was lucky to be Ivan Bondarenko's first student in Novosibirsk, where I had his unwavering supervision and support learning about Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) which was a new topic for me. The expertise that Ivan Bondarenko has taught me basically has defined the rest of my life and I could not be more grateful.
In the 4th year of my Bachelor's I was lucky to become part of the the Center of Financial Technologies' Data Science team jokingly called "Engine Room" ("Машинное отделение" in Russian). Under Ivan Komarov's friendly guidance I was able to contribute and lead various Natural Language Processing (NLP) and ASR projects, while slowly building my confidence as a NLP and ASR specialist.
My Bachelor's journey has ended with an epic collaborative dissertation presenting a toolkit for automatic phonetic transcription of the Russian language. The toolkit was wrapped up in a paper and was presented in the Dialog and Specom conferences.
During the time at NSU I feel I was formed as a professional and have built many precious amicable connections: starting from the supervisors and ending with lifelong friendships with common-minded students where Akademgorodok has brought us together :)
After the Bachelors I have realised I need to improve my maths and coding skills, as well as broaden my expertise in Data Science (DS) and Machine Learning (ML), so I have entered the English-taught Big Data Analytics Master's program in NSU. I was super happy to see students from all over the world there all studying DS and ML together!
Later I was fortunate to get a spot to study in Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour in France via double diploma program! It was an amazing experience to learn about traditional statistical analysis that I missed out on having linguistic background. Moreover, France is gorgeous, Pau being situated right next to the Pyrenees. And I got to study with the best minds of the world again which brings me most joy! :) There is something beautiful about people from all over the world pursuing knowledge and each and every one bringing their own unique perspective on the topic.
I just managed to return from Pau... As covid hit! And then followed months of self-isolation, all while studying in NSU and working remotely in CFT. However horrible it was for the world, for me it was not a life-changing period, I managed to peacefully live together with my partner at that time in a 20 square meter flat. It was more than anything a semi-holiday where I had a bit of rest from the office.
At this time I was actively looking for opportunities to further improve my expertise: other employment or PhD. I felt constrained because in Russia there were not a lot of options to study or pursue ASR research, NLP being the more popular topic. That is when I found out about the ASR research group at the University of Sheffield with Thomas Hain being the head of the group. I did not expect to get in, even less get a scholarship but it happened! :)
Well, here we are at the current-ish time! :) I moved into Sheffield and started my research on the topic of code-switching (CS) - a fascinating language process when a speaker mixes two or more languages in their speech. This kind of speech presents challenges to ASR systems, because the CS data is scarce and as we know ML is quite data-hungry.
PhD so far has not been an easy journey for me but it helped to put things in my life in perspective and understand what really matters to me. If employment has taught me how to be confident, then PhD has taught me how to stand up for myself and why I need to do that. In any case, however difficult or easy, I cherish these experiences for making me a better person and a better professional.
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