Sebastian Birk
Data Scientist and Azure Data & AI Consultant
For the last 3 years, I have been employed as a Data Science and Azure Data & AI Consultant at Avanade. During my time at Avanade, I have built various solutions ranging from supply chain simulations to natural language processing and computer vision applications. I am also a PhD candidate for Deep Learning in Biomedicine. Specifically, I work in the Talavera-López Lab at the Helmholtz Centre Munich where we try to decipher the language of host-pathogen interactions in infectious diseases. I am always eager to learn about breakthroughs and state-of-the-art methods in machine learning in general and graph neural networks and reinforcement learning in particular. I enjoy to read Medium blogs, write my own blog articles and like to listen to podcasts.
MY CAREER
Next to my work at Avanade, I will also start a PhD to apply artificial intelligence and in particular deep learning to understand the language of host pathogen interactions in infectious diseases.
After having completed my Master's degree, I moved back to Munich to start as an Advanced Analytics Senior Analyst. Since then, I have been promoted two times and am a Senior Consultant now. I have acquired broad knowledge across the entire Azure data & AI stack but one of my core areas is MLOps and Enterprise ML Platforms.
During my time at the ESADE Business School, I also wanted to improve my Data Science knowledge on a practical level. I worked as a Data Science & IoT working student at Accenture in Barcelona.
Having completed my gap year, I wanted to do a Masters to learn more about Data Science. I thus applied to one of the leading Data Science programs for students with a business background at the time: the M.Sc. in Business Analytics at the ESADE Business School. Here I specialized in Machine Learning and Cloud Platforms (AWS). I won the Best Graduate of the Year Award.
I then completed another 6-month internship at Amazon to get a perspective from another major tech player. Here I was working as a Business Analyst with a very Data Science-like task profile.
In the meantime, I had graduated from the University of Tuebingen and decided to do a gap year to collect more experience in industry and shape my career path. Driven by a big interest in how tech companies work with data, I went for a 6-month internship with Microsoft. During this time I got to know about data science and machine learning and it was clear that this area was meant to become my passion.
I had my first touchpoint with industry through a 4-month internship in the finance department of Daimler Financial Services in Madrid. During this time, I had the chance to solidify my Spanish knowledge that I had acquired during my undergraduate studies.
As part of my B.Sc. in International Business Administration, I spent a semester abroad in Philadelphia. This was an especially enriching experience to develop my personality as a human and professional.
I started my professional career studying Business & Economics. Early on, I found my passion in analyzing data and generating insights through statistical and financial modeling. I thus majored in Statistics and Finance. In addition, I worked as a Teaching Assistant for "Statistics, Econometrics and Quantitative Methods". In 2016, I won the Best Graduate of the Year Award.