Nima Tajbakhsh

I am very happy to have Nima as a mentor. I was planning on writing a longer review once I had several sessions with him, but just two months in, I can confidently say that he has guided me in a way that helped me greatly improve my machine learning abilities. (I still have a LOT to learn, but I now that I have Nima as a tutor, I can ask him for guidance, so I know exactly where to look and study). Case in point : in our first biweekly meeting, we discussed about the various batch normalization methods, and the fact that they have learnable parameters and consume memory and so on. With this new knowledge in hand, I was able to find that the 'linear evaluation' layer that we added to the pertained model was not actually linear evaluation because there was a BN layer, which had learnable parameters. (i.e. adding BN => ReLU => Linear layer effectively results in 2 linear layers, and ReLU in between, effectively resulting in a 'nonlinear' addition to the pertained model). The discussions I had with him regarding this matter further helped me solidify my understanding of BN, and it was a blast to have what I just learnt being applied to my project right away. :)

I consider this mentorship a game changer in my career and, in order to fully understand how it helped me, I think that it is important that one knows where I stand and my goals. I am already a software engineer working with perception software for autonomous vehicles in a small company. My goal was to land a job in a big tech company (FAAMG-like) but still related to autonomous vehicles, and I have had good chances where I felt that I "almost" got the job but something was still missing. After the last rejection letter after the last round of interviews (for the 4th time!), I decided to look for professional help in order to understand what I was doing wrong. That's where Nima comes in. In our very first call Nima immediately spot on one thing that might have been a good reason for the rejections. We worked on that and after a couple of weeks I already felt like a different person. This, of course, gave me a huge boost in my confidence and, as a consequence, in my "interview game". We kept with "fine tuning" my skills (soft and hard) for a couple of months. We did that through various ways: - topic presentation: Nima gave me a technical topic to cover previously to our meeting and during our meeting we had a simulated interview with in-depth focus on the topic. - Q&A sessions: Sometimes it is not just technical. We also had many "soft" or strategic conversations. I personally think that this is as valuable as the technical advice. Plus, this is definitely not easily available out there. - Chat: Not everything requires a call. I often got meaningful feedback/answers from the chat. This is a great feature since we could optimize the usage of our call time. After 5 months I am interviewing with 3 major players and just got a job offer exactly where I wanted despite the current job market situation (hiring freezes and etc). I can honestly say that this wouldn't have happened without this mentorship. First of all, before that I had totally lost my

Subject matter expertise (5/5): Nima is truly a subject matter expert in CV/ML space. His knowledge goes wide and deep, not only in theory, but also in practical application of the concepts. Teaching ability (5/5): Nima is a natural teacher. He is spot on when it comes to designing the structure, breadth and depth of topics to go through during his mentorship. This helps in gaining subject matter expertise, as well as helps you in prepping for interviews if that's something you are looking for. He is available, and always willing to answer any question with the same high enthusiasm. Communication & attitude (5/5): Excellent communicator - Knows how much to convey, and how to convey the concepts / answers to questions. If you don't understand a topic, he has the patience, willingness, as well as the ability to put across the same concept in a different manner to help you gain the required understanding. Nima is a mentor with a pleasant attitude, which makes him very approachable. Once you are able to connect with your mentor, communication becomes seamless. Besides a mentor, I've gained a friend. Lucky to have Nima as my mentor :)