Extracurricular activities at Sharif University of Technology
The following is a chronological list of my extracurricular activities and academic volunteer services at Sharif University of Technology, and the details of my responsibilities and contributions to each.
DataDays was the first and the largest national data science competition held annually by Sharif University of Technology. Its main goal was to broaden the appeal for working on data-driven problems. In essence, Datadays was a large-scale attempt at assessing data science knowledge in Iran and improving it.
Every year, a group of volunteer data science experts gathers around to create and hold Datadays. I had the pleasure to lead the 2021's Datadays team, a diverse international group of Iranian Machine Learning and data science academic and industrial experts. After intense negotiations with various tech giants and startups in Iran, Torob.ir, an emerging product searching platform for commerce, joined us as our sponsor. After weeks of preparations, we developed a data-driven challenge around Torob's search logs to recommend new products given a raw query.
To teach our participants about the fundamental concepts regarding Machine Learning and Recommender Systems, I authored a roadmap and led the scientific staff in creating Persian Educational notebooks. I also started a talk series and organized workshops by inviting tech and academic experts. To host the competition, I led the negotiations with RoboEpics, a Kaggle like platform for hosting AI competitions, and eventually authored a contract between Datadays, Torob, and Roboepics. Our competition was held during the summer of 2021 and had over 500 participants internationally.
In the first year of the commencement of DataDays, I was in charge of the computational infrastructure. Our challenge was computationally heavy and could benefit a lot from accelerated hardware so I volunteered to setup and maintain a GPU cluster of over 40 units for our contestants.
I also co-develop the Datadays contests platform by contributing to its user-interface implementation written in Django.
WSS is a well known seminar series held annually by Sharif University of Technology. It hosts talks and presentations from international academic experts in advanced topics of computer science and engineering. During WSS 2020, I volunteered as one of the presentation organizers.