Mikhail Karasikov

Mikhail Karasikov

ML Engineer, PhD

kaiko.ai

About me

I am a Machine Learning engineer at Kaiko.AI, where I develop self-supervised and supervised Machine Learning methods for clinical pathology. I focus on building foundation models for pathology images and RNA-Seq data to help hospitals with diagnostics and other types of clinical problems.

I completed my PhD at ETH Zurich, where I designed novel algorithms and compressed data structures for indexing huge collections of biological sequences and developed methods scalable to the entire Sequence Read Archive. These methods finally made this trove of data accessible for search by sequence at scale and demonstrated the feasibility of making all of life's code easily searchable.

Prior, I studied Math, Physics, CS, and Machine Learning at MIPT, Skoltech, and YSDA and worked on a few problems of computational structural biology at Inria Grenoble-Rhône-Alpes.

Interests
  • Machine Learning
  • Bioinformatics
  • Computational Biology
  • Compressed Data Structures
Free time
Education
  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2023

    ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  • M.Sc. in Math. and Computer Science, 2017

    Skoltech, Moscow, Russia

  • M.Sc. in Applied Math. and Physics, 2017

    MIPT, Moscow, Russia

  • PG Dip. in Computer Science, 2016

    Yandex School of Data Analysis, Moscow, Russia

  • B.Sc. in Applied Math. and Physics, 2015

    MIPT, Moscow, Russia

Projects

Ocean Microbiomics Database
Collaboration with Sunagawa Lab. Provided k-mer based sequence search and Counting de Bruijn graph indexes for the Genome Collection of the Ocean Microbiomics Database. Other contributors: Lucas Paoli, Harun Mustafa, Andre Kahles. (Published in Nature).
MetaGraph
A C++ framework library for indexing very large collections of DNA/Protein sequences and a tool for sequence search, alignment, and assembly. Although the target use cases of MetaGraph overlap with BLAST, MetaGraph mainly focuses on the scalable indexing of raw sequencing data in annotated de Bruijn graphs with up to $\sim 10^{12}$ nodes and $\sim 10^{7}$ annotation labels. It also provides an online platform MetaGraph Online. Other contributors: Marc Zimmermann, Thomas Zhou, the MetaGraph team.
GeoDNA
A portal for sequence search and geographical positioning based on the metagenomic MetaSUB data. The initial prototype was set up on a weekend but it served well and was also used as a base for the MetaGraph Search platform. Other contributors: Marc Zimmermann, Jiayu Chen, André Kahles, Thomas Zhou. (Published in Cell).
De Bruijn Graph Visualizer
A web app visualizing de Bruijn graphs and the BOSS table (Bowe et al.). Developed to interactively illustrate the core data structure used as a k-mer index for graph representation in MetaGraph.

Featured Publications

(2021). Lossless Indexing with Counting de Bruijn Graphs. In RECOMB 2022.

Cite Project DOI Preprint Code

(2021). Topology-based Sparsification of Graph Annotations. In ISMB/ECCB 2021.

PDF Cite Project Slides DOI Code

(2020). MetaGraph: Indexing and Analysing Nucleotide Archives at Petabase-scale. In bioRxiv.

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(2018). Sparse Binary Relation Representations for Genome Graph Annotation. In RECOMB 2019.

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Teaching

Courses TAed at ETH Zürich, Institute for Machine Learning:

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