resume

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

hi zane.

tbh i havent had a resume since my junior year internship (2019); i went to straight into grad school and then got wine’d and dined into a job at L’Oreal’s research lab. I quit to build a startup. haven’t really needed a resume in all these years. but since you’re asking, here’s my off-the-dome retrospective.

Work

2024-2025
Built, scaled and exited toby, a live translation B2B SaaS. Speak in english and it’ll translate your voice to 15+ languages on zoom/teams etc in real time. inspired by babelfish.
First real taste of success in entrepreneurship. built a product used by thousands and big corps (panasonic, toyota, etc). hired, fired and inspired. taking a moment to learn more about the world before starting a new venture.

2022-2024
L’Oreal AI research lab, working on the key products (pricing, mixed media marketing, chemical formula algortihms). saw what proper infra scale looks like, production grade enterprise product UX and (un)admirable leadership traits for my team of 20+.

2020-2022
consulting for deloitte, deploying AI algorithms adhoc. informative about a lot of industries, communication/technical bottlenecks, product roadmap timeboxing and how much i dont want to be a consultant. paid for grad school.

<2019
internships in chinese startups, IBM and ad agencies. learned to love coding and the value of shipping when the higher ups are armchairing.

Education

AI research Centrale Supelec grad school, Carnegie Mellon University & Fudan University undergrad.
learned; built:
- several failed startups, proudly.
- multi-week slurn jobs on superclusters
- first AI researcher in residence, Metalab

Industry Affiliate & Lecturer @Columbia University Data Science Institute (2022 & 2023), link

Research:

2025
- outperforming o1 with gpt2 + spaced repetition, link

2022 - 2025
- worked for private companies :/
- SoTA Speech-to-Speech Translation, link
- SiMT policies whitepaper, link
- evals for OpenAI
- amazon carousel PDP optimization, SKU level feature importanct
- inventory forecasting & anomaly detection for eCommerce
- dynamic pricing algorithms, SKU level promo coupons
- data training pipeline infrastructure, link
- $XX billion in algorithmic ad spending distribution, campaign level MMM

2021
- T5-11B, GPT-2 fine tuning to discover the meaning of life, link
- Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL) review, link
- Principle Component Analysis (PCA) review, link
- Batch Normalization review, link
- Epistemics of ML, link
- On the Topic of Autonomous Robots: Ethics, Law and Enquiry, link
- Analysis of Graph Neural Networks on Amazon Co-Purchase Graphs, link
- Anomaly Detection with CNNs, KD-CAE, NI-CAE and DCGAN, link

2020
- book rec engine with KNN, tSNE and DBSCAN, link
- On the topic of Autonomous Robots: Smart Cities, link
- On the Topic of Autonomous Robots: Social and Economical Benefits, link

2019
- rewrote Spotify’s ANNOY embedding retrieval model for eCommerce recommended products, link

i started coding at 8yo following release of pokemon diamond that my parents wouldnt let me buy so i coded it from scratch with scratch (and a very patient paid tutor).

lifestyle

most of my time is spent curating information, rituals and relationships. work is a subset of this. by surfacing information, honing behavior and building trust I have found great health and wealth.

personally, I am interested in comparative mythology, weltgeists, and seeing people smile. I host weekly shabbat dinners with groups of similar people who care deeply about their weird corners of the world (e.g. geologists, ergonomicists, urban planning), and regularly volunteer at opportunities across industries (ai research, print media and esoteric cults).

i want to experience the diversity of human experiences and hypergamble the next venture before agi makes us the permanent underclass :)

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being. – Goethe