About
Hey, I’m Sepand Dyanatkar. I’m a co-founder of OnDeck Fisheries AI, a startup that makes the visual medium searchable. We currently build ubiquitous vision systems with machine learning, like video search and classification without training. We originally started by applying computer vision for fisheries monitoring to reduce economic and environmental destruction of our oceans.
My interests generally revolve around using what I know to solve difficult problems.
Previously, I completed my Master’s in Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge and my Bachelors in Computer Science and Physics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. During my undergrad, I was also a research intern at Polytechnique Montréal’s MIST Lab, working on hierarchical robotic swarms.
Recently, I was a Master’s student at the University of Cambridge, where I was in the deep end of machine learning, reinforcement learning, and various types of distributed systems. For my thesis, I ‘injected’ resilience into multi-agent systems while deployed, using reinforcement learning and GNNs.
In 2019, I was an intern at the European Space Agency’s European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, specifically working on the Electronic FieldBook with the CAVES and PANGAEA team. Later on I worked as a Software Engineer intern at Amazon with the Fuse team.
While at UBC, I worked on rockets with the UBC Rocket Engineering Design Team. Eventually I published some of our avionics processes at the International Astronautical Congress. Over the past few years, I’ve also worked on other fun projects including robot swarms for lunar deployments by Europe, single-cell gene visualizations, an actor-based distributed graph processing system and more.
From 2021 to 2022, I was an elected board member of SEDS-Canada, a student-run student-focussed space non-profit. I continue to tinker with a variety of projects in my spare time, and participate + speak at (space and tech) conferences and activities.
While in Vancouver, I can be found on the mountains skiing and hiking, or on the temperate waterfront biking, running or sailing. In 2024, I did tear my achilles (mildly) training for sub-40 min 10k (still hit this!) + sub-5 min mile, but I’m back to training now 🚀