Armand Nicolicioiu

Armand Nicolicioiu

Research Intern

ETH Zürich

Biography

Interested in Machine Learning and Neuroscience. Experienced with algorithms and data structures and a big fan of competitive programming.

I obtained my Master’s degree from University of Bucharest, doing research in out-of-distribution generalization. Previously, I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Politehnica University of Bucharest, doing research in few-shot learning as my final thesis.

During university, I did several internships: at Google Zürich, Amazon Tübingen and Microsoft Redmond, USA. I also worked as a Machine Learning Engineer in industry.

Download my CV.

Interests
  • Machine Learning
  • Computer Vision
  • Algorithms
  • Neuroscience
Education
  • MSc in Artificial Intelligence, 2022

    University of Bucharest

  • BSc in Computer Science and Engineering, 2020

    Politehnica University of Bucharest

Publications

Neural Redshift: Random Networks are not Random Functions
CVPR 2024 (Oral)
Shortcut Bias Mitigation via Ensemble Diversity Using Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Under submission.

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Institute of Science and Technology Austria
Research Intern
Mar 2024 – Present Klosterneuburg, Austria
  • Working on compressed LLMs in the Distributed Algorithms and Systems Lab led by Dan Alistarh, developing a writing assistant running entirely on-device: PanzaMail.
 
 
 
 
 
ETH Zürich
Research Intern
Oct 2023 – Jan 2024 Zürich, Switzerland
  • Research on semi-supervised learning in the Statistical Machine Learning group led by Fanny Yang.
 
 
 
 
 
Idiap Research Institute
Research Intern
May 2023 – Sep 2023 Martigny, Switzerland
  • Research on the robustness of diversified model ensembles and on the generalization properties of neural networks. Supervisor: Damien Teney.
 
 
 
 
 
Amazon
SDE Intern
Nov 2022 – Mar 2023 Tübingen, Germany
  • Improved an evaluation framework for assaying out-of-distribution generalization in the Causal Representation Learning team.
 
 
 
 
 
Google
Software Engineering Intern
Jun 2022 – Sep 2022 Zürich, Switzerland
  • Using large language models to process the transcripts of YT videos for entity linking.
  • Generating realistic synthetic data to complement existing training sets.
 
 
 
 
 
dotLumen
Machine Learning Researcher
Oct 2020 – Nov 2021 Cluj-Napoca, Romania (Remote)
  • Prototyped a headset to help blind persons be more independent..
  • Multi-modal environment understanding using Computer Vision.
 
 
 
 
 
Microsoft
Software Engineering Intern
Jul 2019 – Sep 2019 Redmond, WA, USA
  • Designed and built a fast generic trending system for large scale data.
  • Microservices pipeline for ingestion, processing, storing and retrieval.
 
 
 
 
 
Microsoft
Software Engineering Intern
Jul 2018 – Sep 2018 Redmond, WA, USA
  • Improved Azure’s real-time telemetry monitoring system by generating recommendations that lead to a faster resolution of alerts.
 
 
 
 
 
Arnia Software
Machine Learning and Computer Vision Junior Researcher
Jan 2017 – Nov 2017 Bucharest, Romania
  • Developed algorithms for improving the HDR camera mode of phones.
  • Researched generic object segmentation and color perception.
 
 
 
 
 
Sparktech Software
Machine Learning Engineer Intern
Jul 2016 – Oct 2016 Bucharest, Romania
  • Built a recommender system for a coupon site from scratch.

Honors & Awards

  • Poster Award & Scholarship at Synapse AI Symposium 2023 by Bending Spoons in Milan for my research project on model diversity.

  • Best Poster Award at Romanian AI Days 2022 conference for presenting my Master’s thesis on Diversifying Vision Transformers for Out-of-Distribution Generalization.

  • Travel Scholarship at Synapse AI Symposium by Bending Spoons in Milan
  • 1st place at the Computational Geometry & Topology Challenge at ICLR 2021 for our Study on Topological Noise Invariant Features.
  • Best Poster Award at Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School (EEML 2020) for presenting my Bachelor’s thesis on Few shot learning by features adaptation with Graph Neural Networks.
  • 1st place at Catalyst Coding Contest 2019.
  • 1st place at Textract 2018.
  • 1st place at ITFest 2017.
  • Qualified for the ACM-ICPC Southeastern European Regional Contest (SEERC 2016) as a 1st year student.
  • Romanian National Olympiad of Informatics:

    • Bronze Medal: 2013, 2015
    • Qualified / Participated: 2012, 2014
  • Romanian National Olympiad of Physics:

    • Bronze Medal: 2012
    • Participated: 2010, 2011
  • Romanian National Olympiad of Mathematics:

    • Qualified / Participated: 2009, 2012