Mikhail Parakhin

Mikhail Parakhin has been leading teams in AI innovation for some of the world’s top tech companies for over a decade. After several years at Microsoft leading the Bing Multimedia team, Mikhail brought his machine learning expertise to Yandex, one of Europe’s largest tech companies that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. As CTO of Yandex, Mikhail leads all technical teams globally for the company. Under his leadership, Yandex introduced the Machine Intelligence and Research (MIR) Division, which functions as a centralized, cross-functional unit to accelerate innovation and unify Yandex’s core machine learning technologies: MatrixNet (proprietary ML platform) and its development, CatBoost (best in class GBDT implementation), DaNet (DNN framework), computer vision, speech, and translation. Yandex has also recently launched it’s intelligent assistant, Alice, and tested its driverless vehicle on the snowy roads of Moscow among other innovation milestones set to shape the future. Mikhail brings his unique background in machine learning and coding plus specializations in Search, Image processing and Handwriting/Speech recognition algorithms to not only advance Yandex’s technologies and products but the global tech ecosystem. Mikhail holds a Master’s in Physics from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute.