Nikola Milošević

Nikola Milosevic


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My name is Nikola Milošević and I am interested in computer programming, digital information security, music, history and Slavic mythology. I have never felt comfortable talking about myself as I consider it narcissistic. However, because of the nature of this page, Nikola Milošević must become a narcissist. Let me begin at the beginning…

Beginning

I was born on Sunday, December 7th 1986 in Bratislava, Slovakia. I was a bilingual kid – my mother is from Slovakia and my father from Serbia – and had learned Slovakian and Serbian by the age of 2. I went to primary school in Serbia (OŠ Mladost) and for a brief while in Slovakia (ZŠ Tematinska), during the 1999 NATO bombing campaign of Belgrade. I completed my schooling at the Ninth (IX) Belgrade High School (9. Beogradska Gimnazija). I went on to study at the University of Belgrade in its School of Electrical Engineering Department of Computer Science and Informatics. I was awarded a BSc (GPA 8+) and MSc (GPA 9) in Computer Science and Informatics. As part of my MSc thesis I built (possibly) the first Serbian language stemmer and sentiment analyzer. As far as I know, it remains the most precise of its kind.

Mithology

I became interested in mythology – especially Slavic mythology – in high school. During my studies, I met a couple of people with whom I built a mythology-oriented website www.starisloveni.com. While the story behind the site is complex, I am proud of several things we created. Starisloveni.com is one of the most highly ranked, Serbo-Croat websites dedicated to Slavic mythology. A significant proportion of the Serbo-Croat texts have been translated into English. The site receives on average more than 350 unique visitors per day. We have systematically classified Slavic gods and mythological creatures. We produced two 45-minute documentaries on Slavic mythology and a web-zine called Veles. Lastly, I was asked to deliver lectures about Slavic mythology in libraries and similar institutions.

Music

I started to create music in high school, after I bought my first electric guitar. My first music project was titled Perunko, for which I wrote and recorded 10 songs. Prior to buying the electric guitar, I used to pay a bit of classical piano but when I got to University, switched to an electronic keyboard. While at university, I attended a music workshop conducted by the renowned Serbian percussionist Veljko Nikolić or Papa Nick as he is popularly known. During the workshop, I ended up founding a band called Zhosen with fellow attendees in which I played different brass instruments and percussion. Later, a few of us also continued to play and record with Papa Nick’s band Institute Music. Towards the end of University, I founded a band called Kapetan Black Šlager with my classmates Marko and Srđan. I play keyboards in the band, we’ve played a few gigs in Belgrade and Pančevo and recorded an album called Kako napraviti drveno poštansko sanduče.

Work and career

Nikola Milošević

My professional life started quite early. During my second year of University year I entered a competition called e-code, organized by TopCoder and the Electrical Engineering Students’ European Association (of which I later became a member). After the competition I was contacted Pexim Solutions (now Asseco SEE), one of the event sponsors. Pexim Solutions offered me a job, which I accepted, and so I started working part-time while still at university. At Pexim I was employed as a Software Development Engineer and worked on automated testing of GUI controls; later on the development of a benchmarking engine for WCF web services.

 

During my final year at university I did an internship at S&T doo. Two months after my internship I started working for German telecommunications company P3 Communications. I worked at P3 Communications for two years on a benchmarking engine for mobile networks (VMCC RAT) as well as several other projects for big telco operators such as Vodafone and Verizon. During my last two months I tested mobile device prototypes for several mobile device manufacturers. P3 communications eventually transformed its Belgrade office, which resulted in the loss of all programming positions. Since I was a programmer, it was time to move on.

 

From November 2012 to January 2013 I worked at Prelovac Media (now Devana Technologies) and was involved in both mobile and web development. I started with the ManageWP project, which is SaaS for managing multiple WordPress websites from a single dashboard. I was responsible for the creation of the ManageWP android application, ManageWP security, and white hat programming. I also created a video messaging service and a family budgeting application.

 

In January 2014 I started a Research Ph.D. at the University of Manchester, the UK in its School of Computer Science, sponsored by pharmaceutical company AztraZeneca. My research topic was text mining and natural language processing in biomedicine.  My side work involved applying machine learning to data collection and extraction for the purpose of creating a web ESG data analytics and auto-investment platform. After finishing my Ph.D. in 2018, I started working as a researcher at the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, where I worked on different text mining and machine learning related projects. As a side project, I was involved in FinTech and digital marketing startups in the UK. I have also lectured some cybersecurity courses at the School of Computing, Science and Engineering, the University of Salford at the master level (Cybersecurity in practice course and Malware and Exploit Analysis). In January 2020, I have moved to Berlin to start a new role in Semantics and Knowledge Graph Technologies team in Bayer Pharma.

Extra

I was a member of the Electrical Engineering Students’ European Association (EESTEC), with whom I worked in PR for several JobFair events, preparing event publications and managing PR team logistics. I have also worked on two, opensource projects Simple Generic Watchdog and Group Mail Sender.

In the beginning of 2012 I founded the local chapter in Serbia for OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) and contributed to an OWASP anti-malware project. I also designed and built http://biznismladihsrbije.org/. As part of my master thesis I designed and built the website you’re on now www.inspiratron.org, which contains Serbian language stemming services; Serbian and English language sentiment analysis services. The stemming service is currently the most precise Serbian language stemmer, with approximately 300 rules as opposed to the typically more than 1000 rules employed by other Serbian language stemmers.

In 2013 my Brand Check idea and my team won first place at the Belgrade Startup Weekend. I am proud of this victory and I hope to one day see the idea become reality and go to market.

Conclusion

I’ve no doubt forgotten a few things but the basics are here. If you want to know more about me, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. My email is [email protected], my LinkedIn is rs.linkedin.com/in/nikolamilosevic1986/, you can on twitter or check out my CV.