Alex Smirnov

London S24 Core

In AskGuru we provide an AI-powered toolkit to help B2B SaaS software providers elevate customer experience and resolve queries efficiently, enabling them to outshine competitors and attract new customers

Improved the language model for Yandex's virtual assistant "Alice"

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• Fine-tuned large GPT-like models (GPT-Neo, OPT) on dialogue data to create an open-domain dialogue engine • Deployed models to the production environment • Collected and processed dialogue datasets • Invented and implemented dialogue engagement mechanics

TSG is a mobile game developer with a focus on the production of hobby games in a free-to-play distribution model. • Conducted research on players’ purchase activity by analyzing ensembles of algorithms using A/B testing to implement best-in-class in-game item recommendations reaching 50M+ consumers, resulting in a 6% increase in revenue from in-game items • Built forecast models by engineering new features to predict player churn with a 0.8 F1 score • Collaborated cross-functionally with customer support teams by evaluating automatic issue labeling to resolve payment issues faster

YARUS is an app that combines the content of different formats: news, music, events, videos, stories and allows users to customize the feed to their interests. • Pioneered news & video recommender systems by evaluating different approaches, analyzing customer engagement, designing system architecture end-to-end using microservices and deploying all modules to increase average session duration on news feed by 20% • Optimized product by solving cold start, data sparsity, and delayed recommender reaction on users’ actions problems to improve CTR by 15%

• Applied segmentation algorithms to 10k core sample images in order to predict core properties by highlighting core types, carbonate, ruin, and oil saturation zones • Partnered with project client by conducting stakeholder interview and understanding business needs to align on project roadmap and requirements