Yuval Boss

Welcome to my site! I registered this domain in 2011 and have enjoyed hosting a variety of iterations of this site over the years, starting as just a simple IRC that friends and I could use to message eachother on our school computers without the teachers knowing.

Since then building websites has become much more automated, I now host this using GitHub Pages, larger assets are hosted on s3 and served by cloudfront, and I use Jekyll for generating static web pages such as this one you are on now.

Current Work

Currently I am a software engineer at Amazon Web Services working in data center automation. It has been a wildly different experience from previous jobs and I’ve had the pleasure of working with really smart people on very interesting challenges at scales that still boggle my mind. The coolest part has been being on a team that is sort of at the center of it all. We own the tracking and availability of asset data for all AWS data center assets through their entire life. We operate across many regions and solve complex challenges in very distributed environments.

Prior Work

Prior to AWS I lead Machine Learning development for the Polar Ecosystems Program at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s Marine Mammal Lab. We develop models and methods for real time detection and classification in aerial surveys which involves a lot of R&D to develop the models and algorithms, along with MLOps and systems work to support development and deployment. Some of my favorite parts of the job were:

• Developing methods for fusing multispectral data to improve small object localization and classification.
• Semi-supervised learning approaches for large, partially labeled, and extremely sparse datasets.
• Ensemble approaches for picking up missing labels.
• Robust and reproducible data pipelines which enable the continuous learning cycle as we train models, collect more data through surveys, and update models.
• Developing labeling workflows for scientific applications.
• Computer vision approaches for quantifying various image quality and other image description metrics.
• Had the honour of being invited to give a talk about this work at ICIP 2021 (slides)

Outside of work

Outside of work I enjoy the beautiful nature we have here in the PNW. In the drier months I spend most of my free time climbing at Index, Washington Pass, or on many other rocks that can be found in Washington. While in Seattle I’m often at the UW Rock, a training mecca and rendezvous for city monkeys.

Check out my trip reports to read about some of my adventures.