CV

Basics

Name Ben Finkelshtein
Email ben.finkelshtein@cs.ox.ac.uk
Url https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-finkelshtein/
Summary Passionate researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Oxford, specializing in Geometric Deep Learning. Supervised by DeepMind Chair of AI Prof. Michael M. Bronstein and Dr. Ismail Ilkan Ceylan. With extensive experience in both academia and industry, I have worked on areas such as natural language processing, anomaly detection, and time series forecasting.

Education

  • 2023.01 - Present
    Ph.D
    University of Oxford
    Computer Science
  • 2019.11 - 2022.06
    M.Sc
    Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
    Computer Science
  • 2013.11 - 2017.07
    B.Sc
    Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
    Electrical Engineering and Physics

Publications

Professional experience

  • 2022.06 - 2023.01
    Applied Researcher
    eBay
    Engineered large language models (LLMs) to match user queries with the most relevant landing pages for search engine optimization. This involved developing a novel keyword extraction technique, which I integrated with GPT-3 and subsequently fine-tuned for optimal performance. These efforts resulted in a significant improvement in user engagement, achieving a 30% increase in landing page click-through rates (CTR) within the first three months of implementation.
  • 2020.08 - 2021.05
    Data Scientist
    SKF Group, AI Center of Excellence
    Designed, customized, and implemented end-to-end machine learning pipelines, taking projects from initial ideation to production. I led research initiatives focused on event prediction, anomaly detection, and time series forecasting to support machinery fault diagnosis. My work included creating an event-based evaluation metric that enhanced the company’s anomaly detection accuracy from 78% to 90%, significantly improving operational reliability.
  • 2017.10 - 2020.07
    Algorithm Developer and Physicist
    Rafael Advanced Defense Systems
    A specialized military service assignment awarded to only one recruit per year, I created a neural network to predict $n$-body problem solutions for classified company use. Additionally, I engineered generative models to predict molecular dynamics pathways using physical simulations and developed new models to analyze stable and transient protein folding conformations, advancing our understanding of complex biological processes.

Teaching experience

  • 2023.07 - 2024.01
    Tutor
    Taught Math, Physics, and Computer Science for A-Levels, SAT, and college exams as an online part-time tutor.
  • 2023.01 - Present
    Head Teaching Assistant
    Head TA for Geometric Deep Learning and Graph Representation Learning courses, responsible over the other TAs, creating coding assignments and guiding 30 students through coursework.
  • 2021.03 - 2022.06
    Head Teaching Assistant
    Head TA for the Geometric Deep Learning course, supervising 40 students and developing tutorials and code notebooks for the course.
  • 2012.07 - 2013.11
    Teacher
    Taught Mathematics, Physics, English, and Coding for matriculation, SAT, and college exams, leading sessions of 30 students.