Max Tkachenko — story
Today I'm the co-founder of Label Studio and HumanSignal. Here's the winding path that got me there — cinema, music, math, and a refusal to sit still.
1childhood
Cinema has inspired me since I was a child. I always felt that miracles don't happen in the real world — but in a movie, any dream can come true. The Terminator, Back to the Future, Jurassic Park and many other masterpieces still light up my life. As a kid I shot silly little films on an amateur camcorder, with my toys as the lead actors. Sadly, none of them survived.
2music
I had a musical education as a child, and it's one of the things that shaped how I see the world. I play bass guitar and keys, and now and then my friends and I put on small concerts. Mixing is part of music too, and it became my first serious experience in media. I started recording in 2003, read a stack of sound-engineering books, and made a lot of tracks.
3programming & maths
After I graduated in 2010, I looked for work related to my master's thesis — which, as you might guess, was about sound: “Adaptive noise reduction based on multi-resolution FFT.” I went deep into R&D in speech recognition, working with neural networks, Gaussian models and other statistical methods — and, with a solid programming background, building the tooling we used to run our experiments.
4building Label Studio
Then the tooling became the product. The labeling and experiment-tracking tools I'd built for my own ML work grew into Label Studio — open source, now used by over a million people — and into HumanSignal, the company I co-founded around it. Overnight my job was building not just models, but the platform thousands of teams rely on to build their own AI.
5cinema
I never stopped loving cinema. I chose engineering as my craft and kept filmmaking as the place I tell stories on my own terms — I direct, shoot and grade my own shorts and commercials between projects. The rigor of ML and the eye of a director feed each other more than people expect.
6photo
Photography is another of my hobbies. I love capturing good shots while travelling and grading them afterwards — it's a kind of magic. You can see one of them in the background.
7physics
Back in school I built a tool for modeling and visualizing plasma. My scientific advisor, Anatoly Umnov, is a brilliant physicist and teacher; thanks to him I gained a deep appreciation for how the world is structured. We wrote the work up as my lyceum thesis, and the tool turned out well enough to win me a third award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF).
8nature, sport & spirit
A few words on nature, sport and spirit to finish. I'm not a fan of big cities — too noisy and dirty, and they give me headaches. Other people's thoughts nearby distract you and pull you off course. So I prefer the countryside: clean air, silence, plenty of trees. What more do you need to do your best work?
9Sport is a big part of my life — a healthy kind of addiction. :) I swam for more than five years, love jogging, and try to hit the gym at least twice a week. If sport is for the body, then yoga and spiritual practice are for the mind: I practise Xing Shen Zhuang, a form of Chinese medical qigong, along with a few dream-yoga techniques.