Team Profile: Azin Asgarian, Applied Research Scientist

What do you work on at Georgian?

As part of the R&D team, I am focused on the technical part of our collaboration with Georgian’s customers, trying to help them grow faster, reduce costs and create new revenue streams by adopting AI into their products. Month to month, this can mean everything from advisory-style projects to deep engagements. 

How did you come to work for Georgian?

I completed my Master’s degree in computer science at the University of Toronto, where I did a couple of projects related to issues in the healthcare industry. At the time, I wanted to start my own company focused on using AI in patient monitoring, but then I happened to meet another member of the R&D team at Georgian. She convinced me to do an internship so that I could learn more about business while continuing to work on technical projects. After six months in the internship, I was offered a full-time position and I took it because I knew I had found a place where I could learn and grow. 

What does a typical week at Georgian look like for you?

I spend a lot of my time working with customers across our portfolio, discussing the challenges they face, brainstorming ideas and evaluating our progress. I also do hands-on work to deliver projects with our customers, whether coding or participating in hackathons to solve a particular problem. In addition, I work closely with the marketing and community teams to run a group called Transferred Learnings, which is a community of machine learning practitioners in growth-stage companies who stay up to date with AI and tech trends through the group’s workshops. 

Can you tell us about some of the projects you typically work on?

We work on projects that are designed to help our customers bring new AI products to market. Some companies we work with are just beginning to hire data science teams and others already have 50 or more on staff. Depending on their needs and level of maturity, we’ll collaborate in different ways. For example, if a company is in the early stages of its AI development, we might run a workshop to help them build their roadmap and then hire the right team to deliver. 

For companies that are more mature, we run a hackathon, where our teams come together for a week to collaborate on solving a specific problem that we’ll then move into production. Sometimes this might lead to a longer engagement to fully develop the idea and bring it to market.

At the end of our engagements, we typically also write up our findings and publish blog posts and papers to share the work back with the community. Recently, our joint paper with Tractable won best paper at Fragile Earth 2022 and it also was accepted into a workshop for Multimodal learning for Earth and environment at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference, the premier computer vision event.

How does your work help Georgian’s customers?

It depends on the project, but our work typically helps them reduce their costs, increase revenue and differentiate their product. Then there’s the help we provide in terms of hiring, training and education. We really roll up our sleeves and try to deliver as much value as possible. I think it’s also important to mention that we don’t charge our customers anything for our services because we know if they’re growing, we’ll grow too.

What do you like to do when you’re not at work?

I love being out in nature, hiking, playing sports, painting and spending time with family and friends. I’m also a big traveler and currently have my sights on Costa Rica, Japan and Ghana.