Researching subliminal learning and data poisoning in model distillation.
Earlier work: language models for code, student–AI interaction research, and scientific simulation.
Open to research engineering and applied ML roles from autumn 2026.
I'm Tim, a Finnish–Ukrainian MSc Machine Learning student at UCL. My thesis tests whether subliminal traits and poisoned behaviours can pass from teacher to student models through training data that appears innocuous.
I build the evaluation tools and software that make research testable. At TNO-ESI, I benchmarked open and proprietary LLMs on industrial code graphs. At VU Amsterdam, I deployed an AI support agent in a large course Discord and built simulation software with climate researchers.
Education matters to me for personal reasons too: I finished school during COVID and watched the war in Ukraine disrupt education further.
Research on model behaviour, code intelligence, exploration, and scientific simulation.
Testing whether hidden behaviours can transfer from teacher to student models through sequence-level distillation, and whether that creates a practical poisoning route against model distillation.
Built a Text-to-Cypher evaluation dataset and compared open and proprietary LLMs. The key result: on a specialised schema with limited data, base-model capability mattered more than small-scale fine-tuning.
Contributed to CuReMix for COMP0258: Open-Endedness and General Intelligence. The project treats intrinsic and extrinsic reward weighting as an automatic curriculum; across sparse-reward Craftax tasks, it matched reward mixtures tuned separately for each task without task-specific tuning.
Turned climate and salinity research into an interactive Godot simulation for policymakers, farmers, and students. The project won the SALAD & Trustfarm hackathon and was shown at FOSC 2024 in Marrakesh.
TNO-ESI
Evaluated LLMs as natural-language interfaces for high-complexity code-analysis tooling.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Supported a longitudinal study of how students use AI in academic settings.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Translated climate and salinity research into an interactive VR simulation.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Taught Python, Intelligent Systems, and Applied Programming for AI.
Finnish Defence Forces · Navy
Maintained simulation software and hardware for military training environments.
University College London
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam