Dragos Stanciu

London · United Kingdom · dragos@dragosstanciu.com

Hi, I'm Dragos! I'm an entrepreneur and I've been coding since I was eight.

Then, I studied at leading universities such as the University of Edinburgh and ETH Zürich where I built brain-inspired AI for drone navigation and perception.

I then applied my experience in industry and founded two software companies. During my spare time, I enjoy cold exposure and going to the gym.

I'm currently building software to improve how robots understand their surroundings using neuromorphic computing.

I'm always happy to explore exciting new projects, always up for a new challenge.

If you'd like to chat with me, feel free to drop me a line at dragos@dragosstanciu.com.

Experience

Founder

Grayscale AI

Enabling robots to see using neuromorphic vision and computing.

January 2020 - present

EF LD12 Cohort Member

Entrepreneur First

Member of the 12th London cohort of Entrepreneur First, one of the top accelerator programs in Europe.

March 2019 - September 2019

CTO and Co-founder

MeshFlow

The vision was to make accurate printing of complex engineering parts possible and safe for any industry. VC-backed business by Entrepreneur First.

July 2019 - December 2019

Founder

Self-employed

  • Developing MVP to test idea in the HR technology sector.
  • Collaborating with business partner on requirements, user stories, and promotion.
  • Built API for back-end and web app for front-end (Django REST framework, Angular, Docker, Auth0, Google Cloud Platform).

August 2018 - February 2019

Software Engineer

Avaloq Innovation

  • Training in Regulatory Reporting and market data interfaces.
  • Collaborating with software architects, business analysts, consultants and customers to analyse, design and develop interfaces to third party systems (PL/SQL, Python).
  • Participating in Design Patterns reading group (Java EE).
  • Giving company-wide technical presentations.
  • Mentoring colleagues.

January 2017 - July 2018

Computer Vision Researcher

ETH Zürich / University of Edinburgh

  • Academic guest at ETH Zürich.
  • Researching the use of neuromorphic chips in robot navigation (C++, Python, MATLAB).
  • Supervised two master students.

October 2014 - December 2016

Application Development and Maintenance Frontrunner

UK Data Archive

  • Wrote unit tests with NUnit and integration tests with Selenium for web apps.
  • Built multithreaded logging service of user activity (C#, SQL).
  • Performed load testing of logging service using JMeter.
  • Continuous integration with Jenkins, issue tracking with JIRA within a team of 10.

November 2011 - June 2012

Research Assistant

University of Essex

  • Wrote software for comparing the performance of different feature detectors in computer vision (C++, OpenCV, MATLAB).
  • Implemented image stitching app as part of a two-student team project.

November 2011 - March 2012

Education

University of Edinburgh

MRes in Neuroinformatics

  • MRes Project: Graph Theory as an Alzheimer's Disease Diagnostic Instrument in the Context of Functional Brain Connectivity - study into identifying differences in brain connectivity between Alzheimer's disease patients and healthy subjects (Grade: 75%).
  • Modules: Data Mining and Exploration, Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition, Probabilistic Modelling and Reasoning.

2013 - 2014

University of Essex

BSc in Computer Science

  • Classification: 1st class.
  • Modules: Data Structures and Algorithms, Software Engineering, Object-Oriented Programming, Computer Vision, Natural Language Engineering, Operating Systems.

2010 - 2013

Skills

Programming Languages & Tools
  • Advanced knowledge: Python, Machine Learning, Java, MATLAB, Git, Linux.
  • Intermediate knowledge: C++, C#, SQL.

Accomplishments

Awards

  • 2013 - scholarship and research grant to pursue MRes and PhD at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Awarded by the EPSRC.
  • 2012 - 2nd Year K. F. Bowden Memorial Prize by the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering of the University of Essex to the top four second year students across the School.
  • 2011 - 1st Year K. F. Bowden Memorial Prize by the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering of the University of Essex to the top four first year students across the School.

Certifications

  • 2010 - Oracle Database Design and Programming with SQL.
  • 2009 - Cisco CCNA Exploration (Network Fundamentals).

Projects

  • 2015 - National Data Science Bowl Plankton Classification Challenge - placed in the top 5.4% of teams (57/1049) as part of a six-person team of PhD students.
  • Writing programming tutorials on my blog Dragon Programmer.