Hi, I'm Samuel. I am a research fellow at Harvard in Prof. Prineha Narang's group, and a Ph.D. student at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I am also a founding parter of my startup Assist-o, offering personal and professional assistants to business people and small companies. I currently spend most of my time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but often travel around. My main areas of interest are Machine Learning and Quantum Computing, in which I have eight publications and one pending patent.
I am originally from Germany but spent almost all of my life in other countries (the US being my 9th). When I was 5 years old, my family moved to Croatia through a German NGO, to help with post-war reconstruction. There I finished elementary and high school. I also went to school in South Africa for a while, as an exchange student. After graduating from high school, I worked as a volunteer teacher in an orphanage in Kenya, near Nairobi, where I started a small coding school program for disadvantaged children.
During my undergraduate studies, I worked in Ice & Climate research at the Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark (see publications). Afterwards, I joined the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co. in London and New York City for a while, where I created computer simulations of the bond and foreign exchange market. Before starting my master's degree at EPFL, I spent some time in the sunny and picturesque city of La Jolla, at University of California in San Diego. There, I worked on Machine Learning research (see publications) and enjoyed surfing in the Pacific Ocean.
Since September 2018, I am studying Physics and Data Science at EPFL in Switzerland. As a research assistant, I work in the group of Prof. Giovanni De Micheli on Quantum Computing. I am also the founder and former president of the EPFL Quantum Computing Association and former vice-president of the Debate and Model United Nations association. In the Summer 2019, I worked at the National University of Singapore on Quantum Optimization Algorithms, with applications in finance.
Since February 2020, I work in Prof. Prineha Narang's group at Harvard on Near Term Quantum Algorithms for Optimization Problems. I am starting my Ph.D. in August 2020 at MIT!
EDUCATION
Starting 2020
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), USA
2018 - 2020
EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), Switzerland
2014 - 2017
University of Zagreb, Croatia
2010 - 2014
XV. High school (MIOC), Zagreb, Croatia
WORK EXPERIENCE
April 2020
Assist-o, Switzerland & USA (Founder, Owner)
Summer 2019
National University of Singapore (Visiting Researcher)
Since 2019
EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (Research Assistant)
Since 2018
University of California San Diego, USA (Visiting Researcher)
2017 - 2018
EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland + Technical University Vienna, Austria (Internship)
2016
D. E. Shaw & Co., London, UK & New York City, USA
2015
Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (Research Internship)
2014 - 2017
University of Zagreb, Croatia (Student assistant, Physics competitions)
2014
Mully Children’s Family Orphanage, Kenya (Volunteer work)
Until 2015
Music performance and recording of CDs
COMPETITIONS & AWARDS
2019
1st place at the IBM Qiskit Camp Europe Hackathon 2019
Since 2018
EPFL Excellence fellowship
Since 2017
Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation)
2014
Award for the best high school graduate in Croatia in 2014 (out of ~40 000 students)
2014
Bronze medal at the 45th International Physics Olympiad 2014 (Kazakhstan)
2014
1st place at the Croatian National Physics Competition
2013
Bronze medal at the 44th International Physics Olympiad 2013 (Denmark)
2013
1st place at the Croatian Championship in Triathlon
2012
Bronze medal at the 45th International Physics Olympiad 2012 (Estonia)
LANGUAGES
English
Full professional proficiency
German
Bilingual proficiency
Croatian
Bilingual proficiency
French
Elementary proficiency
PUBLICATIONS (peer reviewed)
11/2019
QuantHD: A Quantization Framework for FPGA Acceleration of Hyperdimensional Computing
11/2019
SemiHD: Semi-Supervised Learning Using Hyperdimensional Computing
10/2019
AdaptHD: Adaptive Efficient Training for Brain-Inspired Hyperdimensional Computing
07/2019
CompHD: Efficient Hyperdimensional Computing Using Model Compression
05/2018
Particle shape accounts for instrumental discrepancy in ice core dust size distributions
PUBLICATIONS (currently under peer review)
2020
Quantum polar decomposition algorithm
2020
A Stochastic Acceleration Method for HD Computing-Based Machine Learning
2019
DRAFTS (> 90% of the work completed)
2019
Convex Optimization Algorithms for Quantum Computers with Applications in Computational Finance
* The following articles are in Croatian, so You might need to use Google Translate to understand them.
Dnevnik nove TV (the most watched news program in Croatia)
Dobro jutro, Hrvatska (the most watched morning program in Croatia)
COMPLETED PROJECTS
2019
Circuit optimization algorithms for Quantum Computers (Qiskit)
2019
Numerical simulations of quantum devices on high performance clusters
2018
Text Sentiment Classification
2018
Inverse statistical methods for protein simulations