AI Pioneers

AI Pioneers

I remember Alexey Korovin writing a post about how to nurture your professional network. One of his recommendations concerned birthdays: they are a good opportunity both to congratulate someone in your circle and to gently remind them that you are there.

My own birthday was quite recent, and to my surprise, an enormous number of people congratulated me. Thank you to everyone who did—it meant a great deal to me! It was especially nice to hear from people I had not crossed paths with in a long time. So I decided this was the perfect opportunity to meet up with them.

One of the first people to take me up on the invitation was Alexey Ivaschenko. We had a wonderful time at a café last week (see photo).

Alexey and I met while I was working at the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg. At the time, Alexey headed IBM’s North-West division. We worked with IBM on many joint projects, which Alexey and I presented at various conferences.

I am particularly proud of one of those projects because it involved using AI back before everyone was talking about it. In 2017, we deployed an IBM product called Watson at the National Library of Russia. We trained it on all the dissertation abstracts that had been digitised at the library. For some reason, we did not think of building a chat interface for Watson, but we did implement search. And I can honestly say that Watson-powered search amazed us at the time.

Alexey and I later spoke about the implementation at various forums. For some reason, I have no photographs from those events—I am waiting for Alexey to fulfil his promise and send me some from those days. I do, however, have a publication about the project (see the “Publications” section of my profile—for some reason, there is no way to generate a direct link to it).

Alexey’s birthday was just yesterday. Naturally, following my mentor’s advice, I made sure to take the opportunity to wish Alexey a happy birthday.

I am sure that before long, Alexey and I will come up with something new—and once again be pioneers.