Denis Kotkov
Research Associate
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDenis Kotkov is a research-focused software engineer and postdoctoral researcher specializing in recommender systems and machine learning, with a decade of experience spanning academia and industry. He combines strong hands-on development skills in Java, Python, SQL and R with a PhD in Computer Science and a track record of publishing in venues like SIGIR and CHIIR. Denis has led small research teams, created publicly usable datasets (Tag Genome for movies and books), and built domain-specific recommenders such as ClusterExplorer for books. His background includes production-focused Java work on financial GUIs and earlier web and PHP development, giving him an unusual blend of experimental rigor and practical engineering. Based in Glasgow and eligible to work across the EU, he repeatedly bridges user studies, literature synthesis and scalable implementation to turn recommender research into usable systems. Colleagues describe him as methodical and curious, often surfacing non-obvious data signals (e.g., serendipity metrics and item-tag relevance) that improve recommendation quality.
10 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree, Information Technologies and Services in Telecommunication, Master's Degree, Information Technologies and Services in Telecommunication at Saint-Petersburg State University Information Technologies, Mechanic and Optics (University ITMO)Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at Jyväskylän yliopisto
Russian, English, Finnish
Github Skills (16)
gunicorn8
leaflet8
mongodb7
web-application7
flask7
material-ui6
fmi6
react6
recommender-system6
python5
recommender5
nginx5
javascript5
docker5
cypress3
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
Bionic1251/Revisiting-the-Tag-Relevance-Prediction-Problem
May 2021 - Dec 2021
Contributions:14 commits, 14 pushes, 3 branches in 7 months
Bionic1251/SerendipitousAlgorithm
Jan 2016 - May 2016
Contributions:26 pushes, 1 branch, 6 tags in 4 months
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