Nikolai Rozanov’s Personal Page

Welcome to Nikolai Rozanov’s personal webpage!

• I am a PhD student at Imperial College London, working in the NLP group with Dr. Marek Rei, researching LLMs, Reasoning, and AI Agents.

• I am super interested in AI Reasoning and Agents (LLMs & RL).

• Fundamentally, I am interested in the meaning of life and metaphysics.

Summary of Experience

Previously, I had experience as research scientist, engineer, and tech entrepreneur. Most recently, I am a PhD researcher at Imperial College London focusing on LLMs, reasoning, and agentic behavior. Prior to this, I co-founded and led Wluper Ltd. (London-based AI startup) as CTO and Head of Research for 7 years, where I built and productionised cutting-edge AI systems and co-authored papers in top-tier venues.

I’ve led multi-disciplinary teams, secured and managed a £500K Innovate UK grant, and collaborated with academic leaders such as Prof. Iryna Gurevych (former ACL president). I also advise and consult on GenAI projects – recently leading LLM-based translation evaluation at Rask AI.

I speak regularly at conferences (e.g. CogX 2023, Podcast Show 2024), and my goal is to bridge state-of-the-art ML research with practical applications.

News

• [2024.11] Presented: IsoChronoMeter at WMT 2024 (EMNLP) – a metric for evaluating isochronic translation
• [2024.07] Organized the Imperial Computing Conference as PhD Rep
• [2024.06] Speaker at “The Podcast Show” 2024 on AI-powered dubbing at Rask AI
• [2023.10] Started as PhD Candidate at Imperial College London

Select Work Experience

• PhD Student, Imperial College London, London (2023–Present)
  PhD in LLMs, LLM Reasoning, LLM Agents
  Graduate Teaching Assistant for RL, CV, NLP courses
  PhD Rep and conference organizer (ICC24)

• Senior Research Scientist @ Rask AI (part time), London (2024)
  Led LLM-based MT and evaluation
  Speaker at industry events (e.g., EMNLP, The Podcast Show)

• CTO & Co-Founder @ Wluper Ltd., London (2017–2023)
  Built AI systems from scratch, led a team of 9, published 6 papers
  Managed £500K Innovate UK grant and partnerships with top research labs

• Research Internships:

  • Machine Vision & Monte Carlo Methods @ Imperial College (2015,2016)
  • Software Engineering @ Rezonence (2016)

see my CV for more details…

Selected Publications (see full list on Google Scholar)

1. StateAct: State Tracking and Reasoning with LLMs
   REALM @ ACL 2025 (under review) | Paper, Code |

2. IsoChronoMeter: Isochronic Translation Metric
   WMT 2024 @ EMNLP | Paper|

3. Learning from Free-Text Human Feedback
   EMNLP 2023 | Paper|

4. Adapter-Based Knowledge Injection
   EMNLP 2020 (DeeLIO) | Paper|

5. Evolutionary Data Measures
   CoNLL 2018 | Paper, Code |

…more on Google Scholar

Talks

• 2024 – Speaker @ The Podcast Show (London)
• 2023 – Speaker @ CogX Conference (London)
• 2022 – Plug and Play Accelerator - Voice AI (Bay Area, remote)

Hobbies and other achievements

• 🏆 Forbes 30 Under 30 (European Technology) – for Wluper Ltd.
• ♟️ Chess medalist – Gold at BUCA Plate, and medals at various national/international tournaments
• ⚗️ Olympiads – Chemistry Olympiad (3rd in Vienna), Philosophy Olympiad finalist
• 💻 Built a custom GPU rig for deep learning + Linux sysadmin skills
• ⚙️ Deep into CUDA & GPU programming – trained via Oxford with Prof. Mike Giles & NVIDIA certifications
• 🌍 Multilingual: German (native), English (fluent), Russian (fluent), French & Latin (basic)
• 🏒 Passionate about ice hockey, sailing, and swimming