About Me
I build deployed AI systems and conduct independent reinforcement learning research. My work spans computer vision for retail loss prevention (Sentra Retail OS, co-founded), edge AI on hybrid Radxa/Hailo + Vast.ai infrastructure, and world-model failure modes in model-based RL (DreamerV3 research, targeting RLC 2026). I care about edge AI, real-world deployment, and democratizing AI access in Central Asia.
Service & Professional Activities
- Founder & Instructor — AI Course: Designed ML curriculum for high-school students; multiple participants qualified for the IOI/IOAI national teams; one cohort member won the Meta LLaMA Accelerator.
- Organizer & Chief Judge — World Space Olympiad: Co-organized international competition with 200+ teams and a 1,000,000 KZT prize pool.
- Mentor & Coach — Aqtobe Robotics: Mentored 4+ FIRST teams to international competition stages, including teams that reached FTC Houston Finals.
- Program Committee Member — YFS (Youth Founders Summit): Entrepreneurship summit with a 6-month accelerator; ~1% acceptance rate.
- Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC): Advanced AI and neural network research training.
[Note]: Open to research collaborations in RL, world models, and edge computer vision.
Research
- "When the World Model Lies" — DreamerV3 Failure Modes: Independent research on world-model hallucination and value-function divergence in model-based RL. Findings include imagined-to-real reward ratios reaching ~50× on AntMaze at 500k steps and KL divergence collapse as a leading indicator (r=−0.91, ~50k step lag). Published on Zenodo with reproducible HuggingFace Space and GitHub repository. Targeting arXiv submission and RLC 2026.
- Polygence Research Fellow (2025): Selected with partial-tuition scholarship (~40% acceptance); conducted mentored ML research project.
- JOAI 2026 — Neural Decoding: Placed 27/98 in international competition predicting mouse lever position from calcium imaging data.
Ventures
- Sentra Retail OS — Co-founder & ML/CV Engineer. Hybrid edge/cloud computer vision platform for retail loss prevention, deployed in Astana retail locations. 8-model pipeline (YOLOv11-Pose, AdaFace, SCRFD, MobileCLIP, SigLIP, OSNet ReID, ShopliftingNet 3D CNN, MediaPipe) on Radxa Cubie A7A edge hardware with Vast.ai cloud inference. FastAPI/PostgreSQL/Qdrant backend on Railway, WhatsApp Business API for real-time alerts. Secured 1.2M KZT investment from Almaty Akimat, partnership with ALEMAI, patent granted.
Projects
- NeuroForge: First UTM drone management system in Kazakhstan.
- BCI/EEG Wheelchair Control: Real-time EEG pipeline using AD620 instrumentation amplifier; CSP/EEGNet classification with SSVEP and Motor Imagery paradigms. Dashboard built in HTML/vanilla JS/Chart.js.
- CubeSat Flight Software: ESP32 WROOM + ESP32-CAM platform with LoRa 433MHz (SX1278) telemetry pipeline. Organized World Space Olympiad CubeSat tournament under ALEM Championship.
- KazPunct (XLM-RoBERTa + CRF): Kazakh punctuation restoration pipeline for hackathon; reached 0.73 F1 on out-of-distribution test data.
- KazOAI 2026 (Qwen3 LoRA): LoRA fine-tuning pipeline for Qwen3-0.6B/0.8B on structured output generation (JSON/YAML/XML/CSV/TOML).
- ChronoSort (FLL Project): AI archaeology assistant using SigLIP for artifact classification on Raspberry Pi 5.
- Bionic Prosthesis: Brainwave-controlled (EEG) artificial limb.
- Underwater Drone: AI vision for human identification underwater.
- Smoke Detection: YOLOv5 pre-trained model on Raspberry Pi/ESP32.
- Intellectual Helmet: VR system and smart sensor for pilots.
- Forest Fire Monitoring: Ensemble learning pipeline for early fire detection.
Honors and Awards
Research & ML Competitions
- NRG First National ML Challenge — 1st Place
- Contradictory My Dear Watson (Kaggle NLI) — 6/204
- Junior Olympiad in AI (JOAI) 2025 — 14/55, 2026 — 92/190
- AICA AI Challenge Uzbekistan — 1st Place
- Republican Olympiad in AI — 16/40
Robotics & Hardware
- FIRST Central Asia (KazRockets Satellite Design) — 1st Place, Simplicity & Efficiency (1/220)
- FIRST Central Asia — 1st Place, Best Mascot (1/220)
- FIRST Central Asia — Best Strategy Award Winner
- NASA Space Apps Challenge — Best Hardware Solution
- KSDT Satellite Design Tournament — 1st Place
- World Space Olympiad — Finalist (2024 & 2025)
- Nuris Hardware Challenge — Finalist
- FTC/FRC/FLL — Main Coder & National Winner (Top-6 Worldwide FTC)
Startup & Entrepreneurship
- SENTRA × Almaty Akimat × ALEMAI — 1.2M KZT Investment + Patent
- BOL — Patent + Clinical Partnerships + Press in Digital Business
- ARA Startup Program — 12M KZT Investment
- Startup Nation — 1st Place
- Next Startup — 1st Place
- Alga Business / Pitch Day — 1st Place
- Generative Pitch — Top 3
- AIGA Case Competition — 3rd Place
Olympiads & Programs
- YFS (Youth Founders Summit) — Full-Ride Scholarship (~1% acceptance)
- Polygence Research Program — Partial Scholarship (~40% acceptance)
- International STEM Olympiad — 4th Place / 87 teams
- Republican STEM Olympiad — 2nd Place (2/75)
- City Informatics Olympiad — 1st Place (2024)
- AITU iCode Round 1 — 7th Place (9/2000)
- NIS Science Festival — Winner; Republican Research — 1st Place
Publications
- Zenodo (Preprint): "When the World Model Lies" — Failure Modes of DreamerV3 Under Distribution Shift (DOI assigned; targeting arXiv and RLC 2026)
- Hackster.io: Monitoring of Industrial Emissions via Gauss Method
- Medium: Kazakhstan Industrial Data Study
- Dev.to: Emission Analysis for 2019 Data