Michael V. Yudelson, Ph.D.

myudelson.github.io   Pittsburgh, PA, USA   

Professional Summary

An R&D leader with 16 years of international experience in Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI. I possess a unique blend of academic expertise (Candidate of Technical Sciences, Russia; PhD, USA) and a proven track record of building IT products for millions of users. My areas of specialization include commercializing complex scientific innovations, architecting high-performance data pipelines, implementing generative AI, and leading cross-functional teams of engineers and analysts.

Key Achievements

• Advanced Computing and Machine Learning Development. Architected and implemented a high-impact BI and Gen AI solution at Chegg, Inc. that enhanced the efficiency of a critical solver component by 11% and directly contributed to product goals.
• Strategic Product Management. Spearheaded the development and deployment of a diagnostic model at ACT, Inc., which enabled a new data product that resulted in doubling client engagement with the company website.
• Research and Publishing Excellence. Co-author on 2 US patents, 90+ peer-reviewed papers; organized 5 workshops and 1 conference, delivered 20+ academic and industrial talks.

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Professional Experience

Akyn Avtomatika Consulting, Russia

Jan 2023 – present

chief technology officer

• Led the development and implementation of AI data processing infrastructure and automated content production.
• Organized the development of an audio-video processing application, increasing the client team’s output fivefold.

myProse, consulting project

Sep 2025 – Jun 2026

chief technology and architecture consultant

• Built the startup’s technology infrastructure.
• Developed the go-to-market strategy.
• Organized the development and launch of the MVP.

Chegg, Inc

Jun 2022 – Nov 2024

staff AI engineer, Learning Sciences and Data Science

• Developed a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) service and carried out 20+ analytical experiments.
• Spearheaded fine-tuning a Gen AI model for extracting expressions boosting service component’s accuracy by 11%.
• Led a cross-functional team (engineers, analysts, data labeling experts) in developing quality assessment systems for AI models.

BrainPOP

Apr 2021 – Jun 2022

Principal ML/AI Engineer, AI and Data Science

Orchestrated efforts on ideation, design, and implementation of ML/AI-based product features offering automated answer-scoring capabilities as one of only two ML engineers in the company.

ACT, Inc.

Jul 2017 – Apr 2021

Senior Research Scientist/Senior Software Developer, ACTNext/Emerging Technologie

• Designed and built a diagnostic student learning model for the ACT Academy platform.
• Created an analytical pipeline for validating a suite of models.

Carnegie Mellon University

Jan 2016 – May 2017

Principal ML/AI Engineer, AI and Data Science

• Scaled a suite of affect detectors to serve up to 60 million students.
• Co-created a hybrid teacher-machine tutoring approach that performs automated hand-offs.
• Brokered acquisition of multiyear student data for theoretical and practical investigations.

Carnegie Learning, Inc.

Mar 2013 – Jan 2016

Research Scientist

• Optimized an algorithm serving 0.5 million users a year to save 37% of the in-app time.
• Headed a multi-team effort analyzing data of 350 000 users and built analytical pipeline.
• Brokered a transfer of 1 billion records of user data from the vendor and carried out 1000+ data modeling replays.

Carnegie Mellon University

Oct 2010 – Feb 2013

Post-doctoral Fellow, Human-Computer Interaction Institute

• Created a novel approach to modeling student knowledge acquisition and published the results in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings (this work was cited over 600 times).
• Developed an open-source tool for building Bayesian models at scale on datasets of up to 1 billion records.

Education

University of Pittsburgh

2004-2010

Doctor of Philosophy in Information Science, Summa Cum Laude
Dissertation: Providing Service-Based Personalization In An Adaptive Hypermedia System.

Ivanovo State Power University, Russia

2001-2004

Candidate of Science in Computer Aided Design, Summa Cum Laude
Dissertation: Development of models and methods for advanced online training of CAD operating personnel.

Ivanovo State Power University, Russia

1996-2001

Systems Engineer in Computer Aided Design, Summa Cum Laude

Skills

Programming

Python, C/C++, Java, SQL, R, Matlab, Shell script, GNU AWK.

Solutions

AWS (RedShift, DynamoDB Sage Maker), Docker, Terraform, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Postman, CI/CD, CNN, RNN, JIRA, Confluence.

Methods

Statistical analysis, model evaluation, data science & modeling, NLP, deep learning, SaaS, audio/video signal processing, speech transcription, educational data mining, user modeling, A/B testing.

Soft skills

Adaptability, collaboration, communication, decision-making, emotional intelligence, leadership, problem-solving.