Evan Radkoff
Verified Expert in Engineering
Machine Learning Engineer and Developer
Seattle, WA, United States
Toptal member since January 29, 2021
Evan is a former Amazon engineer specializing in applying machine learning and data science to solve the most difficult problems. He is the rare full-stack data scientist who can deliver on the entire ML engineer lifecycle from exploratory data analysis to model tuning to deployment and operations. Backed by an MS in CS, Evan also ramps quickly on new projects and deals well with ambiguity. Evan loves working with natural language data and is passionate about the intersection of AI and music.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Scikit-learn, PyTorch, Slack, MacOS, Jupyter Notebook, Python, PyCharm
The most amazing...
...thing I've developed is a GAN-based generative model that outputs drum patterns that sound good enough to be used as percussion in actual songs.
Work Experience
Self-employed
Self-employed, Sounds and Words LLC
- Offered contracting and consulting services for gaming, finance, data recovery, and defense businesses.
- Released an app in the macOS App Store that intelligently splits album audio files into tracks, reaching #72 on the music app charts.
- Developed classification models for drum sounds, using deep learning, for a future product.
- Trained a GAN-based generative model that writes original drum patterns for use in electronically produced music.
Machine Learning Engineer (Contractor)
Sidetrack AI
- Wrote a Python module that ingests email data and intelligently segments emails into smaller parts using a CRF and LSTM.
- Discovered an optimal solution for clustering business documents based on multimodal data. Established evaluation metrics to ensure quality clusters.
- Modeled high-level features of business documents with text classification methods.
- Researched and implemented several state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction methods, including sequence-to-sequence generative neural networks, adapting them to a new domain.
- Adapted an open-source data annotation software to fit our needs. Oversaw the collection of thousands of labels for multiple ML tasks.
Software Development Engineer
Amazon.com
- Created a back-end service for authors to manage events related to marketing their books.
- Designed and implemented back-end APIs for a data dashboard that lets authors see how their books are selling and how readers are engaging. Data is pulled from several marketplaces worldwide and aggregated to multiple time periods.
- Delivered a core feature to Author Central, a platform for authors to manage their presence on Amazon that allows authors to associate books with their profile.
- Responded to several service outages by diagnosing systems in real-time and providing a speedy path to recovery. Wrote post-mortems of outage events and put fixes in place to prevent recurrences.
- Helped build and maintain deployment pipelines for over a dozen services.
- Launched Write On by Kindle, a story lab and community for writers and readers.
- Secured user data by integrating with Amazon-internal encryption solutions.
- Saved the company tens of thousands in monthly costs by initiating an audit of servers and ETL job use.
- Gave a lecture internally about the Scala Collections API and functional programming.
Experience
Drum Sound Classification
https://www.soundsandwords.io/drum-sound-classification/Modern music production can involve incorporating drum one-shots from large, disorganized libraries of sounds. I am working on AI methods to help effectively navigate such libraries, which includes dealing with mislabeled or inconsistently labeled files. Not only do neural networks solve this problem, but I've found that the intermediate embeddings they produce are useful for other related problems. This work is part of the research and development for a future product, released in the meantime as a blog post and open-source project.
Album Split macOS App
https://www.soundsandwords.io/software/Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison - Madison, WI, United States
Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science
The College of Wooster - Wooster, OH, United States
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Scikit-learn, PyTorch, NumPy, Pandas, TensorFlow, SpaCy, Matplotlib, SciPy, Keras, NetworkX
Tools
PyCharm, Git, Slack, Google Compute Engine (GCE)
Languages
Python, Java, Scala, SQL, CSS, JavaScript, HTML, Swift, Bash Script
Platforms
Jupyter Notebook, MacOS, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon EC2, Linux, Docker, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Storage
Databases, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), NoSQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL
Frameworks
Hibernate, Spring
Paradigms
App Development
Other
Clustering Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Music Information Retrieval (MIR), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Text Classification, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Algorithms, API Design, Distributed Systems, Neural Networks, Graphs, Research, Regular Expressions, Audio, Data Science, Librosa, Deep Learning, Automated Summarization, Keyphrase Extraction, Data Mining, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), APIs, Time Series Analysis, Data Modeling, Computer Vision, Compilers, Servers, Digital Signal Processing, Custom BERT, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders, CI/CD Pipelines, Google BigQuery, Reinforcement Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning
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