Introducing Eetu Pursiainen, NLP Virtuoso

I joined Veracell as a senior data scientist to work on natural language processing and text analytics for Cambri, a growing market research company. Since then, my role has expanded to include ML engineering and data engineering.

As an optimization-oriented person, I strive for simple and efficient solutions at work and in my free time, whether it's a coding project or planning a dinner. In my spare time, I enjoy playing badminton and going to the gym, as well as coding personal projects related to machine learning models.

My current career path was shaped by a series of coincidences. Originally studying engineering physics at Aalto University, I found myself more interested in working with research data than electronics and equipment. This led to a diploma thesis in text analytics for the hospital district of Helsinki and Uusimaa in 2016.

After my studies, I have worked at HUS, Futurice, CGI and in my own company Pursi AI. I have done a lot of NLP, but also all kinds of data-related work on a large scale. For example, in one project I developed a model for predicting the mortality of patients with traumatic brain injury, and this was also published: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53889-6.

I became a consultant at the beginning of 2020 because I wanted to be able to expand my own expertise. I also wanted to learn how analytics are implemented and managed in different organizations.

My main development language is Python, but I have also used Scala and Java in the past. In addition to Python, the most common libraries I am using are pandas, sklearn, numpy, pytorch and transformers. The most familiar cloud platforms for me are Azure and AWS, both of which have several years of experience in data science and engineering tasks.

In data science, my special area of expertise is NLP and text analytics, which I have done for several organizations in many different sectors.

I heard about Veracell from Sergei Häyrynen, with whom I had previously worked in my previous projects. Sergei contacted me and asked if I would be interested in doing a small freelance gig in addition to my day job. The offered project sounded interesting, so I started working on it first part-time and eventually full-time.

In the future, I hope to be able to solve interesting problems, the solution of which has a clear measurable benefit for someone. I want to learn new things and be able to apply new technology in my work. I like coding and being able to implement solutions myself, but in the future I could imagine doing more work in lead or advisor roles as well.