Research Assistant & Teaching Assistant at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Worked on behavior simulation as part of the MegaBites project at the Data Science & AI Lab (dlab). Subsequently worked on AI safety at early stages of training large language models. Focused on reinforcement learning methods applied at the pretraining stage, with work spanning implementation, experimentation, and initial safety evaluations.

Also supported instruction and grading in a 600+ student graduate course (CS-401: Applied Data Analysis).

Completed my thesis in industry at Nestlé Research under the supervision of dlab @ EPFL, working with Giuseppe Russo. As part of this, I worked on two independent projects:

1. Synthesize, then Rectify: a framework for simulating valid human survey responses with LLMs and statistical inference. Later continued as part of my research assistantship and extended into a paper.
2. Dietary data mining: implemented a self-updating system that automatically scrapes, classifies, and extracts nutrition data from 30,000+ sources using LLMs with auto-prompt optimization.

Robotics Tutor at TechSpark Academy in Zuoz, Switzerland. Taught students to build and program autonomous robots using Arduino kits.

Machine Learning Engineer Intern at Netcetera in Skopje. Integrated knowledge graphs into a BERT-based search engine, enabling hybrid retrieval that combined semantic and graph querying.

Freelance Machine Learning Engineer in Skopje. Worked on two projects:

1. Developed a deep learning model for AFib detection, improving diagnostic accuracy compared to the client's existing system.
2. Created a software tool for automatic invoice generation.

Machine Learning Engineer Intern at Emteq Labs in Skopje. IMU- and video-based ML models for human activity recognition (HAR), investigating semi-automated dataset labeling approaches.

Machine Learning Research Intern at Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Improved predictions of quality of life for heart failure patients by personalizing a gradient-boosted model at the user level.

Best Paper Award at the ACL Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing (BSNLP) 2025 in Vienna.

Signal Processing Scholarship from IEEE Signal Processing Society. Awarded for excellence in signal processing research and academic achievements.

ICASSP Signal Processing Cup - Grand Prize. 1st place among 50 teams at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) - the world's premier conference for signal processing research ($5,000 prize).

ML Road Segmentation Challenge. 1st out of 58 teams as part of the ML course.

Best Student Award at FEEIT, UKIM. 2nd place in BSc Electrical & Computer Engineering program - graduated with distinction.

Hackathon Winner at Hasso Plattner Institute. 1st place in the federated learning challenge.

Academic Excellence Scholarship from the Ministry of Education, North Macedonia. Scholarship for outstanding academic performance throughout undergraduate studies.