Profile

I am originally from Serbia (do you know where it is? South-East Europe) and I’ve lived and worked in several places in Europe (Switzerland, Germany, Ireland).  I like learning and using new languages and getting to know different cultures, making friends from all over the world.

I’ve heard many pronunciations of my first name 😀 but the correct one is: M as M in English, both As as “u” in “cut”, J as “y” in “yes”.

Apart from maths, I love music (finished a music primary school for piano (6 years) and took singing lessons) and languages (in addition to Serbian, my native language, I speak English, German, Spanish and a little bit of French and Slovenian, and I am translating from time to time).

I work in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a science which teaches computers to process and analyse large amounts of natural language (English, German, French, Japanese, Chinese, …) data.

Most of the time I work on machine translation, a sub-field of NLP where computers translate from one language to another using probabilities. The probabilities can be calculated as percentages of words and phrases seen in the two languages, or by applying a lot of functions (a neural network) on the texts.

Do you know what Google Translate is? Just one of many computer programs for machine translation.

My favourite part is to look into the text which a computer translated into a language I know, and see which kind of errors appear most often. And then, I have to find a mathematical formula which I can use to teach a computer to find these errors.

Sometimes I think about what I would like to find out that nobody has found out so far. Then, I have to find out how exactly to use maths to do it. Once I have a computer program doing the necessary maths, it produces a bunch of numbers and I have to figure out what all those numbers actually mean! When I do, I have to write about it so that the other people can read it. Some days I spend travelling to conferences, visiting different places in order to meet with other people doing similar things and tell them about my work, and also to hear about their work.

Some days I am doing only one of these things. Sometimes even one thing for several days. Other days I do a little bit of everything. Most often it is a mixture of one or two.