bio

My name is Pouya Karimian (پویا کریمیان in Persian). I’m a computer science PhD student at Sate University of New York at Buffalo (UB) under supervision of Prof. Mingchen Gao. Previously, I was a research assistant under the supervision of Prof. Azadeh Fakhrzadeh at the Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology, where I worked on a research project related to digital pathology and image segmentation. Before that, I was a graduate student in health systems engineering at Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), where I also received my B.Sc. in Industrial engineering. During my M.Sc., I mainly focused on machine learning and its application in healthcare. I’ve done my thesis under the supervision of Prof. Abbas Ahmadi and Prof. Ammar Jalalimanesh in the area of human pose estimation.

I’ve always been passionate about two things: creating new things and teaching other people. Creating new helpful things has always made me happy. Making a new device with Arduino, developing new software to automate a process, making a machine learning model to solve a problem, writing a plot, or even composing a new song are all creations that make me feel alive. Also, teaching my knowledge to others and helping them to grow is another delightful activity for me. Since high school, I have tried to explain hard problems to my classmates. In the university, I was TA for some graduate and undergraduate courses too.

Creation and teaching may seem irrelevant to each other, but I found a conjunction of these two passions of mine in machine learning. Making a new model that can learn to do a human job accurately and fast is the most enjoyable thing for me. Since I have been introduced to machine learning, I have tried to gain knowledge and update my skills to make more efficient machine learning models.

My personality, according to the MBTI test, is classified as Architect (INTJ-A). To know me better, take a look at my Big Five test and my workplace personality profile: Plum profile.

In my free time, I enjoy reading books, playing football (or soccer!!) and basketball, watching movies, playing PS, and hanging around with my friends. I’m a Real Madrid fan and have followed them since 2002 (just when Zidane made that shot!!). I’m very interested in reading books with genres like self-helping or organizational psychology. One of my favorite writers is Adam Grant. I recommend his bestseller book: “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.”