Summary
Dana Aubakirova is a research-driven machine learning engineer specializing in multimodal vision-language-action models for robotics, currently leading the SmolVLA effort at Hugging Face. With a strong academic foundation from École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay and Université Paris-Saclay and three years of hands-on experience across research labs and industry, she has applied deep learning to thermal face datasets, document understanding, patent captioning, and robotics. Her work bridges theoretical vision research and practical deployment—maintaining Hugging Face’s LeRobot and shipping multimodal models for real-world robotics tasks. Dana’s background in mathematics and diverse research roles gives her a rigorous experimental mindset and a knack for extracting signal from noisy sensor data. Colleagues describe her as curious and interdisciplinary, drawn to how human perception informs model design and evaluation.
3 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
M2 - Master's Degree the 2nd year, MVA - Mathematics, Vision, Learning, Mention Très Bien, M2 - Master's Degree the 2nd year, MVA - Mathematics, Vision, Learning, Mention Très Bien at École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay
M1 - Master's Degree the 1st year, Artificial Intelligence, CGPA 3.7, M1 - Master's Degree the 1st year, Artificial Intelligence, CGPA 3.7 at Université Paris-Saclay
Bachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics, Bachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics at Nazarbayev University
English, Turkish, Kazakh, Russian, Spanish, French