Dmitry (Dima) Petrov

• 2025–present Research Engineer, Foundation EGI — on the technical-drawings team, building spatial-AI systems that automate labor-intensive CAD work; work on machining-feature detection in low-data regimes and CAD tokenization.
• 2024 Research Intern, Roblox, San Mateo, CA — developed kinematic-graph inference for segmented 3D meshes, recovering joint connections and parameters so static meshes can be rigged and articulated automatically; resulted in an ICCV publication (GEOPARD) and a patent application.
• 2022 Research Intern, Adobe Research (BIG Lab), remote — designed a generative diffusion model for 3D shapes built on a novel skeleton-based neural field, producing shapes with robust geometry and topology (published as GEM3D, SIGGRAPH 2024).
• 2021 Research Intern, Adobe Research (Procedural Imaging Group), remote — developed part-aware, editable 3D shape reconstruction by assembling local implicit functions, enabling fine-grained edits of reconstructed shapes (published as ANISE, TVCG 2023).
• 2019–2025 Graduate Research & Teaching Assistant, UMass Amherst (CICS), Amherst, MA — conducted PhD research on generative 3D AI (skeleton-based shape generation, part-aware reconstruction, and cross-shape attention for shape analysis); assisted Machine Learning, Visual Computing, and Game Programming classes.
• 2015–2018 Earlier ML research (computational neuroscience) — Imaging Genetics Center, USC: large-scale quality control of brain-shape segmentations and evaluation of 35 structural-connectome construction pipelines; IITP, Moscow: kernel-based neurodegenerative-disease classification from connectomes.
• 2016 Freelance Data Scientist, Ezhome (gardening-services start-up) — built pricing models from web-scraped real-estate data, expanding instant-quote coverage from 50% to 80% of users and lifting conversion ~5%.

Before tech, I spent almost a decade in journalism and copywriting. I started in journalism before university — as an FMCG reporter at the business weekly SmartMoney, then a reporter and later editor at the daily newspaper Trud. Later, alongside my undergrad, I freelanced as a copywriter and editor in the advertising and custom-publishing departments of Harvard Business Review Russia and Sanoma Independent Media. I genuinely loved that work. (Fun fact: Trud — "Labor" — once held the Guinness record for the world's highest-circulation newspaper, peaking at over 21 million copies in 1990.) As the space for independent journalism in Russia kept shrinking, I moved to math and computer science — probably the right call, since most of the outlets I wrote for are now gone or state-dependent, though I still miss it sometimes. Earlier still, I dabbled in online marketing for software that ran on Pocket PCs and pre-iPhone smartphones — because why not.

• 2010–2014 Freelance Copywriter, Harvard Business Review Russia (advertising) — advertorials and business-case tasks for magazine competitions.
• 2009–2011 Freelance Editor, Sanoma Independent Media, Moscow (custom publishing) — corporate print issues; won the 2010 PROBA-IPRA "Best Corporate Media" award for PwCCampus.
• 2007–2009 Reporter → Editor, daily newspaper Trud — covered the Russian labor market, employers and occupations; promoted to edit the Labor Market section.
• 2006–2007 Reporter, business weekly SmartMoney — feature articles on FMCG markets and companies; Best Article of 2006 for "Red Directors".
• 2005–2006 Product Manager, Paragon Software — product copy, email campaigns and Google AdWords advertising for the Pocket PC platform.

Some of my old material (in Russian): sostav.ru.