EXPERIENCE
CEO OF JEBENA APP
2020 - Present - New York, NY
Jebena App is the largest dating app for Ethiopians and Eritreans. There are 130,000 users on the platform with 500,000 matches made and 5 million messages exchanged as of September 2023. Link: https://onelink.to/jebena
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
September 2022Â - July 2023 - New York, NY
Developed advertiser tools for Amazon Prime Video
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
July 2018 - July 2021 - New York, NY
Worked on a loan origination dashboard for the Commercial Real Estate division.
RESEARCH ENGINEER CO-OP
January 2016Â - May 2016 - Houston, TX
Built a Graph Database for the collection of data NASA gathers from various missions and experiments it launches. The project was initiated because NASA needed to use Graph Database for its Lessons Learned Database to view and identify patterns within the various lessons compiled from entries submitted by different people and various timelines. Normally, Graph Database is used for pattern and relationships recognition, however there is a lot more you can do with data using it. For instance, Google uses it to display relative ads, and LinkedIn and Facebook implemented their "People You May Know" feature using it, while Amazon uses it to recommend to its customers products similar or complementing to the products they are buying.
VISUAL TRANSLATOR - SENIOR CAPSTONE PROJECT
Fall Semester 2016
Description: This translation tool allows you to simply snap a photo of a text and do a 2-way translation between a non-Latin language and English. In this case, I used Amharic letters. Amharic letters are derived from Ge’ez which is a script also known as Ethiopic, and is used as an alphasyllabary for the Amharic and Tigrinya languages, spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea respectively. The tool uses computer vision to recognize the characters on screen to create translations. This project won Ohio State University’s 2016 Tech Grant. Full story published in, https://techhub.osu.edu/news/2016/11/16/and-grant-goes-2016-student-project-grant-winners
Design Process: Key element of the user experience in this case is simplicity. The home page of the app is a camera, and users can choose the direction of the translation, whether it is the select language -> English or English -> the select language. As soon as the user snaps a photo, the remaining steps take place automatically. The computer vision kicks in and recognizes the text that is on screen, then the recognized text is sent to the translation engine.
EDUCATION
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
Major: Computer Science and Engineer.Â
Minor: Leadership Studies
August 2012 - May 2017