Catalin Avram

Summary

Activities in AI Research

I do independent research in the field of AI. My focus is to understand better what is intelligence and what makes us different from other living creatures. What better way to understand intelligence than to build it?
More to follow...

Activities paying the bills

Mid 2014 - present - Software Engineer Freelancer
I have been freelancing on various projects in different technologies and industries

I am currently working in a Machine Learning project at BETALabs @ BMW in Munich where I create end to end machine learning pipelines for data aquisition, training, validating and deploying of deep learning models.
Previously I worked at Ford Canada, in Waterloo, as a React Developer for their new HMI system which was launcehd on the Mustang Mach-e. You can see it here
Before that I was at BMW in Munich working on the next generation of HMI systems. My focus was on setting up a test automation framework with hardware in the loop for validation and end-to-end testing for complex systems
I have worked on many other projects for Audi, Allianz, Janssen Pharma and many more
I am always open to new potential clients, in particular in the AI / Machine Learning / Data Science field. Feel free to contact me.

Mid 2008 Co-Founded LottoRace

I have co-founded LottoRace - a lottery type game which was quite succesfull on Facebook during early 2010s.
Primarely I did front-end development for the game itself and the backoffice system.
I wrote the game initially in Actionscript3 (for the Flash runtime) and later re-wrote it in Javascript using hipster tech like React
You can see a nice video about the game and how it looks like here and here
Takeaways: An amazing feeling of accomplishment to see a product being built from absolute scratch and then launched and used by hundreds of thousands of people.

Mid 2005 to Mid 2008 Systems Analyst at Sun Life Financial in Toronto, Canada

This was my first job and first exposure to corporate environment.
I automated the budget and forecasting systems for the internal financial services corporate division.
Mostly used Visual Basic and VBA for Excel.
First time exposure to data visualization techniques using the good 'ol pivot table.
Takeaways: I learned how corporations work in all their nasty glory.

Activities creating the bills

I have started many hobby projects and finished very few. Here are some more notable ones

Mid-2015 PhobiaOVR A complete solution for self-treating phobias using Virtual Reality. We created a prototype, together with a Psychotherapist, that would allow people to get treatment for phobias using a Virtual Reality headset. We got as far as competing in Berlin for funding, unfortunatelly we did not make top 10 and decided to stop putting our own money in this. I learned a lot about the medical field and it was fun creating the prototype. More info can still be found here and here
Mid-2016 Emvix We wanted to create a product that can integrate Hololens (and other augmented reality devices) and remote worker help. We went as far as creating a prototype of something that now Facebook calls "Meta". It was really fun to work on this and got a first glimpse into AR and Hololens (which I think was way ahead of its time in 2015/2016). The site is still up and can be viewed here
When I was in highschool (around 2000) I got into an argument with someone on mIRC and they DoS me big time. I decided to make my own firewall, so I created, from an older PC a linux based hardware firewall. I used whatever version of Debian was available then, installed two network cards and wrote a routing table. I could still get attacked, but at least my real computer was protected from a direct attack
In 2002 I wanted to create my own version of Mathematica or Maple software. So I wrote a Matrix Operations command line tool where you can do all the basic matrix operations on multi-dimentional matrices. The original Sourceforget page is still here.

Activities regarding education

My formal education is somewhat different from what is considered a norm, but I believe it's better to learn by doing

In early 2021 I decided I do not like to leave things unfinished, so I enroled online at University of London and I am pursuing a BSc Computer Science
In 2020 I completed Andrew Ng's Deep Learning Specialization. It's a great overview of the entire Deep Learning field
In 2019 I completed the Self Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree. I learned how self driving cars work. I made Youtube video going through all the projects I finished. You can watch it here
2002-2005 I enrolled in BSc Computer Science at York University in Toronto. I was conflicted between theoretical computer science and practical stuff you do at work. I dropped out a semester before graduating