This is Saint Petersburg, Russia -- the city I was born and grew up in. After two years in Lyceum 239, I went to St.Petersburg State Polytechnic University, and received bachelor degree in applied math.
	That's where my big journey really starts. I moved to Nuremberg, Germany, and got my masters in computer science from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), majored in pattern recognition and had psychology as my minor. Language modeling and extraction and use of prosodic information were two main areas of my investigations.
I then entered a PhD program in the same school, however during those years I would spend half of my time working at AT&T Labs in New Jersey.
	Quite a bit of a commute, really. One year I'm a research associate in Germany, next year I'm a contractor in New Jersey. Back to Germany, back to the East Coast, Germany, East Coast...
Oh, and for those interested: the research was in the fields of machine learning and spoken language understanding and focused on call type classification, named entity processing as well as alternatives to word-based algorithms in these areas.
	and after that, the road goes to Cambridge, MIT Media Lab. Here I was working on unsupervised grammar extraction from text and also on understanding of navigational instructions. Later I spent a year at BBN Technologies developing question answering and information extraction systems.
Since winter 2007 I'm in sunny California, working at International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley and liking it :-)