Horia Mărgărit
Verified Expert in Engineering
AI Engineer and Consultant Developer
San Jose, CA, United States
Toptal member since November 16, 2021
Horia's industry experience extends across digital health, consumer finance, internet search, engineering software, and transportation logistics. He has over 10 years of expertise applying AI methods and approaches to tackle businesses problems. Horia's predictions for business applications of AI have been featured in CIO magazine and Forbes. He earned a master of science degree in statistics at Stanford University and two BAs specializing in cognitive and computer science at UC Berkeley.
Portfolio
Experience
- Deep Learning - 11 years
- Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) - 7 years
- Cognitive Computing - 5 years
- Cognitive Science - 5 years
- Psychology & Mental Health - 3 years
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) - 3 years
- Multi-task Learning - 2 years
- Meta-learning - 2 years
Work Experience
Team Lead | Machine Learning
Tropicana Brands Group
- Built time-series forecasting models for sales, supply chain, and integrated business planning (IBP), benchmarking GRU, Transformer, and long short-term memory (LSTM) models within Apache Spark (Databricks).
- Developed an AI assistant using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and benchmarked it against PEFT using LoRA for optimized response quality.
- Led algorithm development for marketing and trade promotion optimization. Developed contextual multi-armed bandits (MAB) using the upper confidence bound (UCB).
- Benchmarked deep learning models and gradient-boosted trees for context learning.
Technical Research Fellow
US Naval Nuclear Lab & Stanford Wehab Lab
- Developed quantum circuits for solving elliptic PDEs. Utilized Qiskit on IonQ, Quantinuum, and IBM quantum hardware to provide insights into quantum hardware performance. By appointment through the foundation: Womanium Quantum.
- Led AI-driven mental health intervention research, using Shapley values and FDR for personalized mental health models. Earned honorable mention at CHI20 for innovation in AI mental health.
- Authored IEEE publication celebrating our applied quantum computing research. Additionally, I published a second IEEE paper on artificial intelligence (AI) applied to mental health (panic attacks, particularly).
- Published an award-winning conference paper at CHI20 on the subject of AI for preventing panic attacks. I was personally interviewed on this subject by the Stanford Daily.
Director | Data Science
PepsiCo
- Designed, fundraised for, and delivered three internal software products. Each product was measured and demonstrably increased brand reach and consumer product sales.
- Coordinated across data engineering, product management, marketing brand directors, and internal customer success managers to ensure smooth maintenance and operations of all three delivered software products.
- Restructured three geographically siloed teams and performance-managed them. Retention was 90% throughout the restructuring and stayed at that level throughout my engagement.
- Defined and hosted tech talks and tech demo presentations on an alternating biweekly cadence. Provided stakeholders with visibility into the individual contributors of my group. Ensured cross-functional collaboration with other groups.
Consultant | Artificial Intelligence
Antares Audio Technologies
- Designed, implemented, and deployed two deep learning sequence models. Both models leveraged state-of-the-art (SOTA) mechanisms, such as shift operations as replacements for convolutions and masked self-attention as replacements for recurrence.
- Ensured each of the two sequence models was interpretable and explainable to my two business stakeholders; the CMO and the COO.
- Coordinated with their software engineers how to integrate the two sequence models into their automated business processing pipelines.
- Coached the CMO and the COO on how to best consume the forecasts and the automatically generated explanations for their downstream automated business processes.
Director | Data Science
Booster
- Built their data team of four engineers. My team was horizontally integrated and served the needs of all other business units. My three business stakeholders were the CFO, the CMO, and the CPO.
- Oversaw the creation of the company's business intelligence queries and dashboards and managed its quality assurance.
- Participated in the design, implementation, and deployment of their demand forecasting systems for their B2B and B2C customer segments.
- Participated in the experimental design and analysis for pricing elasticity and demand response to pricing changes.
- Participated in the experimental design and analysis for marketing conversion and customer engagement with referral programs.
- Performed supply-side pricing analysis and informed executive stakeholders throughout multiple contract negotiations with Fortune 100 enterprises.
- Analyzed the quality and the efficiency gains of their proprietary vehicle routing software.
- Managed the data science support of their engineering efforts, including data modeling and analytics for their proprietary IoT platform.
Consultant | Artificial Intelligence
Stanford University
- Co-developed novel AI applications for personalized behavioral health treatments.
- Took part in the work that was published in the peer-reviewed IEEE scientific journal.
- Developed an AI system for personalized behavioral health treatment that was awarded an honorable mention in the peer-reviewed ACM CHI20 scientific conference.
Manager | Data Science
Autodesk
- Managed six machine learning engineers to create, deploy, and maintain three production systems in an Apache Spark powered data platform.
- Participated in the design, implementation, and deployment of their enterprise's customer churn rate forecaster.
- Contributed to the design, implementation, and deployment of the enterprise's sales recommendation system.
- Collaborated with the design, implementation, and deployment of the enterprise's software piracy detection system.
Consultant | Artificial Intelligence
Qubole
- Defined machine learning consulting offers for their B2B professional services division. My business' stakeholder was their senior vice president of professional services.
- Implemented, deployed, and marketed two deep learning solutions for drug discovery. These solutions helped them land their first contracts with publicly listed pharmaceutical companies.
- Improved their platform by demonstrating artificial intelligence solutions at large conferences, such as Strata and PyData.
- Worked on the platform by accurately predicting trends at the intersection of big data and AI and ML during interviews with CIO magazine and Forbes.
- Helped them win contracts with publicly listed banking and finance companies by providing deep learning and machine learning consultations with prospect clients.
Project History
Artificial Intelligence for Behavioral Therapy
https://www.stanforddaily.com/2019/10/21/researchers-work-on-device-to-help-individuals-with-autism-handle-stress/Our work was featured in Stanford magazine. Feel free to read the interview in the link provided.
Our work was also awarded at the peer-reviewed scientific conference ACM CHI20, and the US government granted us additional funding to continue our efforts.
Said grant money helped us develop the project further and subsequently publish in the peer-reviewed scientific journal IEEE.
Quantum Mini Apps for Engineering Applications: A Case Study
https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12920Acted as the lead author on an IEEE publication celebrating our work at the US Naval Nuclear Laboratory (by appointment through the foundation: Womanium Quantum).
Education
Master's Degree in Statistics
Stanford University - Stanford, California, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley - Berkeley, California, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Cognitive Science
University of California, Berkeley - Berkeley, California, USA
Certifications
Generative AI with Large Language Models
Coursera
Machine Learning in Production
Coursera
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Spark ML, Keras, Scikit-learn, XGBoost, TensorFlow, BigDL, PyTorch, JAX, LSTM
Tools
ChatGPT, GitLab, Spark SQL, Amazon SageMaker, Docker Compose
Languages
Python 3, Python, Julia, R, SQL, Scala, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Bash Script, QML
Frameworks
LightGBM, Apache Spark, MXNet, Flask, Multi-armed Bandits (MABs)
Paradigms
Automation, DevOps, Business Intelligence (BI)
Platforms
Jupyter Notebook, Databricks, Linux, Docker
Storage
NoSQL
Other
Deep Learning, Experimental Design, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Data Science, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Causal Inference, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Recommendation Systems, Time Series Analysis, Sequence Models, Time Series, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Probability Theory, Predictive Modeling, Predictive Analytics, Data Analytics, Large Data Sets, Data, Data Visualization, Market Research, Algorithms, Data Scientist, AI Programming, Large Language Models (LLMs), Neural Networks, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), Modeling, Statistical Analysis, Regression Modeling, Statistical Modeling, Data Analysis, AI Model Training, Technical Leadership, Consulting, Mentorship & Coaching, Forecasting, OpenAI, Data Modeling, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), LoRa, Hugging Face, AI Consulting, AI Design, Large-scale Production Deployments, Cognitive Computing, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Experimental Research, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Stochastic Differential Equations, Stochastic Modeling, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Meta-learning, Multi-task Learning, Psychology & Mental Health, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Behavioral Science, Software Architecture, IT Consulting, Business Consulting, Computational Algorithms, Physics, Audio, Finance, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), API Integration, Workforce Management (WFM), LangChain, Computer Vision, Machine Vision, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Generative Design, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Adversarial Machine Learning, Demand Planning, Pricing Models, Pricing, Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Big Data, Health, Leadership, Performance Management, Software Design, Stakeholder Management, Product Management, Feature Prioritization, Project Budget Management, Annual Budgets, Budget Management, Product Planning, Product Roadmaps, Unsupervised Learning, FastAPI, Bayesian Inference & Modeling, Quantum Computing, Quantum Circuits, Quantum Machine Learning, Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), Variational Quantum Linear Solver (VQLS), Quantum Information, Transfer Learning, AI Agents, Light LLMs, Open-source LLMs, Contextual Bandits, Non-generative AI, Transformer Models, Long Short-term Memory (LSTM), LSTM Networks, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), AI Algorithms, Convex Optimization, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Bayesian Machine Learning, Bayesian Networks, Meta Llama, Distributed Training, Parallelism
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