Elias Avan (Abdollahnejad)

Applied Machine Learning Scientist II at TD

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

About

Data scientist and computational linguist with professional individual and teamwork experience; Efficient knowledge and hands-on experience of programming (e.g. Python, R, SQL), natural language processing (NLP), experiment design, language modeling and machine-learning algorithms; Practical experience in different topics in linguistics and psycholinguistics along with general qualitative and quantitative research such as experiment design, data collection, processing, and analysis. Hands-on experience in the observation and interpretation of human conscious and subconscious behavior and reactions in response to different environmental (e.g. linguistic and non-linguistic) stimuli. Worked as the research coordinator at psycholinguistics and language acquisition labs at the University of Calgary, designing and conducting experiments through indirect on-line methodologies, e.g. linguistic priming & eye-tracking.

Experience

  • Applied Machine Learning Scientist II at TD
    Apr 2025 - Present · 1 yr 3 mos

  • Manulife (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
    • Senior Data Scientist
      Sep 2024 - Mar 2025 · 7 mos

      Member of the Advanced Analytics team, applying AI and machine learning techniques on large volumes of data using cloud-based solutions (Azure, Databricks, Spark, etc.) to derive business value in different industries, with a focus on NLP and fraud detection applications. More recently, I have been working on implementation of LLMs in different applications through techniques such as RAG (i.e. chat with your own data), MultiAgents, etc. using tools such as langchain, Azure promptflow, etc.

    • Data Scientist
      Mar 2023 - Sep 2024 · 1 yr 7 mos

    • Associate Data Scientist
      Oct 2021 - Feb 2023 · 1 yr 5 mos

  • Computational linguist & Machine Learning Scientist at HireGround Software Solutions
    Jul 2020 - Sep 2021 · 1 yr 3 mos

    Developed and trained machine learning models for automatic matching of job descriptions and candidate resumes. Conducted research and implemented complex systems using machine learning techniques, deep neural networks, and data-driven approaches in applications involving information retrieval, text analysis, NLP, and language understanding.

  • University of Calgary (4 yrs 10 mos)
    • Graduate Research Assistant
      Sep 2015 - Jun 2020 · 4 yrs 10 mos

    • Sessional Instructor
      May 2019 - Jun 2019 · 2 mos

      Teaching a linguistic course at undergraduate level