Samira Yousefinaghani

A data scientist researcher with four years of industry experience in software engineering and machine learning (NLP focused). I have a background in information technology engineering and computer science with interests in uncovering stories from the data and building predictive models to automate decision-making in real-world problems. I have authored more than ten manuscripts and presented my work via journals and conferences.

Senior Data Scientist and Machine-Learning Engineer at Bluescape, California (Jan 2022 – Present):

• Responsible for voice command identification in Bluescape meetings.
• Conducted sentiment analysis on customer reviews and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) using Python, including syntax and entity recognition with spaCy.
• Worked on image generation from text using transfer learning techniques like Dall-e 2 and Stable Diffusion.
• Implemented a search engine, configuring Postgres and Apache Solr (Docker images).

Research Assistant (Postdoc) at the School of Computer Science, University of Guelph (Jul 2020 – Jan 2022):

• Applied machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) models to analyze Twitter data, Google Trends, news, and spatiotemporal datasets.
• Conducted semi-supervised classification of vaccine opinions for a large dataset of 1 million posts.
• Led active learning classification efforts to identify and combat misinformation across 5 million posts.
• Conducted topic modeling of media content and worked on demography detection of Twitter users.
• Prepared publications and presentations based on research findings.

PHP and Database Developer at LifeWeb Corporation, Tehran, Iran (Apr 2013 - May 2016):

• Managed continuous and automatic data collection and storage from social media posts and news websites.
• Developed and maintained APIs for data access and retrieval.
• Designed and customized databases to meet user requirements, including modifications and upgrades.
• Utilized SQL queries for generating business intelligence reports related to trends, keywords, and influential users.
• Took responsibility for software releases.

Data Structures Lecturer at Islamic Azad University, Pardis Branch (Sep 2014 – Dec 2014):

• Delivered lectures on data structures to students.

• Ph.D., Computational Science (GPA: 4/4), May 2016- June 2020, University of Guelph, ON, Canada. Thesis: A Decision Support Framework for the Surveillance and Prediction of Avian Influenza Events.