Personal Information
- Full name: Mahsa Hajlotfalia
- Born: 3 July 1993, Yazd-Iran
- Phone: +49 15733791092
- Email: mahsa.lotfalia@partner.kit.edu
- Email 2: mahsa.lotfalia@gmail.com
- GitHub: github.com/mlotfalia
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mahsa-lotfalia-243a7752
Education
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
(From October 2023 - Present), Karlsruhe, Germany
Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Management
Subject: Analyzing the financial market
during the financial crisis and predicting the future based
on Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) data using ML & DL
Amirkabir University of Technology
(2020 - 2022), Tehran, Iran
M.Sc. in Information Technology Engineering (E-Commerce)
Overall-GPA: 4/4
Master Thesis: Predicting the success of
startups based on online data using ML (Score: A)
Supervisor: Dr. Mohammad Akbari
Yazd University
(2011 - 2015), Yazd, Iran
B.Sc. in Software Engineering
Dissertation: Implementation of electronic
health system
Supervisor: Dr. Mehdi A. Sarram
Research
-
17th National Conference on Computer Science & Engineering and
Information Technology (Oct 2022)
Predicting overall position of startups (Persian). Certification here. -
First International Conference on Business Development & Digital
Transformation (Nov 2022)
Startup success prediction using ML (English-Persian). Certification here. - Member of Data Science Innovation Lab at Amirkabir University of Technology. See the website here.
Research Interests
Predictor models for risk management in economics, commerce, and healthcare under uncertain data. Focus areas include Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, and feature extraction from social media/news/textual data.
Honours & Awards
- Ranked first among 12 M.Sc. students (IT Engineering, E-Commerce), 2020-2022 (October).
- Ranked within the top 0.1% in Iran's 2011 National Universities Entrance Exam.
Selected Projects
- Predicting the success of startups (Master Thesis): A late fusion model for predicting success using ML, DL, and NLP.
- Clustering a mall's customers: Analysis for predicting spending. View Project.
- Predicting the future trend of a stock exchange in Iran: View Project (ARIMA).
- Extracting deep features from text: Sentiment analysis with CNN & BERT. View Project.
- Image detector: CNN-based image detection. View Project.
- Developing strategy for Iran Alloy Steel Company (2021): Building a 5-year strategy and prospect.
- Digital transformation in insurance company (2021): Analyzing digital transformation trends in US insurance companies.
- Investigating relationship between digital marketing & AI (2021): Research & expert interviews.
- Front-End projects:
Teaching Experience
- (Winter 2014) Artificial Intelligence TA at Yazd University (Dr. Derhami).
- (Winter 2021) Reengineering Business Process Assistant at Amirkabir University (Dr. Kermani).
- (Summer 2024) Teacher Assistant & Researcher at KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany. Duties: problem-solving sessions, lectures, grading, etc.
Job Experience
- (2016-2018) Vira Group – ASP.NET programming (HTML/CSS, JS).
- (2018-2021) Isatis Pouya Group – Head of Machine Learning.
- (2021-2022) Freelance web application development.
- (2022-2023) Development of Iranian Alloy Steel – Head of ML & Development.
- (Since 2023 October) Researcher at KIT (Predictive models in finance & banking).
- (Since 2024 November) Researcher-Assistant at KIT (Simulating Labor economy).
Technical Skills
- Programming Languages: Python, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React
- ML Libraries: NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-Learn, Dask, Spark, Seaborn, Matplotlib, SciPy, Statistics
- Deep Learning: Keras, TensorFlow, Scikit-Learn
- Other Software: LaTeX, Git/GitHub, Power BI, WordPress, Figma, Visio
- Languages: Persian (Native), English (Fluent, IELTS 6.5), German (Elementary)
Extra Certifications
- Neural Network and Deep Learning
- Web-Development
- Systematic Team Coaching (Ten Truths about CoachMe Team Coaching):
- Machine Learning for Finance in Python (DataCamp)
References
-
Prof. Dr. Martin Ruckes
Professor, Department of Finance and Banking
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Email: martin.ruckes@kit.edu | Phone: +49-72160843427 -
Dr. Faisal Saeed Malik
Senior Researcher, Dept. of Entrepreneurship, Technology Management, and Innovation
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Email: faisal.malik@kit.edu | Phone: +49-72160848970 -
Dr. Mohammad Akbari
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science
Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT)
Email: akbari.ma@aut.ac.ir | Phone: +9821-64545875