Who am I?

If you are reading this I assume you already know my name (or can see it written in large letters somewhere on your screen right now). Unfortunately, the name given to me by my parents, albeit (probably) sounding strange or hard to pronounce unless you come from this small (but lovely) country, happens to be quite common - I currently share it with a professional accordion player, a professor in psychology, several medical doctors and a football player, among others.

For those still reading… this page is about Plamen Sashev Dimitrov - the geek, the musician (not the accordion guy, though - I can’t stress this enough).

What do I do?

• My interests span multiple areas of computer science - distributed systems, AI, machine learning, evolutionary computing and others.
• I have work experience both in the IT and research industries.
• I’m not afraid of the command line. I’m very afraid of things that force you to only use the mouse.
• I write everything in Vim. I edit this site in Vim from my command line.
• I love linux (especially Arch), everything open source and I happen to be a DevOps enthusiast.
• Back in my days at Jacobs University Bremen I was also very interested in bioinformatics and took several advanced courses in biochemistry, cell biology and bioinformatics and went through some quite intensive lab training courses. This still remains somewhat of a hobby/interest.
• The philosophy of science resonates with my views of the world. I strongly believe Occam’s razor is not for shaving.
• My Erdős number is currently 4. So must be Erdős' Dimitrov number ;)

Currently I’m…

• working full-time as a DevOps Engineer at StyleShoots

I used to…

• study computer science (MSc) at VU University. My master’s thesis had to do with hacking OpenNebula to make it possible for parallel MPI programs to dynamically adjust the number of physical machines participating in the computation at runtime.
• automate things with Ansible and be an Android neophyte at shuffler.fm and pause.fm.
• participate in Google Summer of Code 2014 doing work for Ganglia.
• intern at TNO, where I learned about software defined networking and internet factories.
• work as a research assistant at VU University, where I used sentiment analysis techniques to find out what makes people depressed.
• work as a sysadmin at SDL Fredhopper.
• intern and later work as a research assistant at Fraunhofer MeVis - institute for medical image computing.
• study computer science (BSc) at Jacobs University Bremen. My BSc thesis aimed to identify the congestion control algorithms most widely used on the Internet with active probing.

Publications

1. Self-adapting fitness evaluation times for on-line evolution of simulated robots
   (Cristian M. Dinu, Plamen Dimitrov, Berend Weel, A. E. Eiben)
   GECCO ‘13 Proceeding of the fifteenth annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation conference

2. Identifying TCP Congestion Control Algorithms Used on the Internet (in preparation)
   (Plamen Dimitrov, Seyedshams Feyzabadi, Anuj Sehgal, Jürgen Schönwälder)
   European Conference on Networks and Communications 2014 - Testbeds and Experimental Research

What else do I do?

Despite all the years of soulless obsession with science and tech, my creative/artistic self have managed to survive very much intact to this day (or at least I like to think so). My relationship with music started at the age of 4 when my father thought it would be great if, ironically (see the top of this page), he could teach me how to play the accordion. About two years later I ditched the accordion and started taking piano lessons. Things were going great and I decided to become more serious about music - I focused on classical music and won several contests on a national level while I was in high school. Around that time I also started to teach myself how to play the guitar and drums, got my first synthesizer and started playing in various bands around town.

Today I’m still actively playing keyboards and guitar and just recently also started to work on my voice. I find joy in using open source tools (such as Ardour and the Calf Studio Gear) to record and produce my music. I might occasionally post tracks/videos and blog about my musical activities here. Be warned!

You can check out some of my stuff on soundcloud.