Kamila Dagilova Bekshentayeva
BSc Electrical Engineering
MASc Engineering Science
STEM EDUCATOR
Email:
Address:
Beijing, China
Welcome to my Portfolio!
As a STEM educator with a background in Engineering and Research, I am passionate about inspiring young minds to explore the world of engineering, science, and technology. I believe in creating an inclusive learning environment that fosters creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving skills. I welcome you to explore my portfolio and learn more about my journey.
Teaching EXPERIENCE
2023-present
PGCE Washington D.C. teaching license (expected June 2024)
Course work and projects with a focus on culture of schooling, learning in a digital age, managing the learning environment, data driven instruction, role of families and technology for climate and culture of learning environment
Design Technology Co-Teaching (IB MYP, DP) at Canadian International School of Beijing
- Ensuring student-centered, dynamic and innovative teaching approach
- Preparing lectures and activities based on MYP design cycle, DP SL and HL topics
- Contributing to the holistic (interdisciplinary) IB vision by supporting students in and outside of classroom
- Valuing collaboration with colleagues to innovate, create, and refine, as well as embracing communication with all stakeholders
STEM Master at USAGSO, troop leader:
- Conducting all troop activities safely by adhering to GS Safety Activity Checkpoints and Volunteer Essentials procedures.
- Leading and designing STEM series meetings (the most recent meeting at Airbus Engineering Center at Shunyi: 80 girls; featured in JingKids (Number 1 International family resource in China), Girl Scouts of greater New York).
2022-2023
Technology and Professional Development
Embassy of the RK to PRC
Information Technology, Technical Writing, Design Thinking courses
2021-2023
Senior Lecturer
AITU: Department of Intelligent Systems and Cybersecurity
Introduction to Cybersecurity; Information Security Fundamentals: designed courses, delivered lectures (200 students) and laboratory classes (each group: 25 students), evaluated students’ performance; online and offline format.
After-school activities:
Writing for publications (students learned how to prepare research papers for international conferences and journals, learned IEEE standards and citation style);
Research tools (students learned how to use Overleaf (latex));
Career development (career orientation, students prepared CVs, cover letters)
2019-2021
Research Assistant,
Teaching Assistant
Simon Fraser University: Department of Applied Science
Data Communication and Networking (under 100 students): Designed practice classes, graded assignments and exams.
Final year project course: Engineering Technology and Society, Process, Form, and Convention in Professional Genres (delivered lectures to four small groups (each group approx. 25 students), graded assignments.
Research: Network Intrusion Detection using Machine Learning, network anomalies and Internet Routing data analysis
Research: Virtual Network Embedding in Data Center Networks, using C++ based VNE‑sim tool and VNE algorithms
Other EXPERIENCE
2022-2023
Technical Specialist
2021-2022
Data Scientist, Business Analyst
2016-2018
Lead Operations Specialist
Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan to China
Developing and maintaining WeChat application KazConsul that provides various consular services
ryte.ai
Developing solutions based on NLP algorithms (BERT), decision trees, neural networks, as well as large data extracted from PubMed, governmental and user review data;
Implementing Agile processes (Devops) to manage teams;
Technical tools/knowledge: AWS Databricks, Azure Synapse, Tableau, DevOp, Linux, Miro; PySpark, SQL,
python, pandas, Spark MLlib, Regex, normalization, gradient boosted trees, random forest, decision trees, regression, classification, clustering.
IBM East Europe/Asia
Coordinated weekly and monthly forecast process across CIS and Russia
Participated in sales cadence, provided accurate information about the forecast numbers, key deals, pipeline, week‑to‑week changes, sales plays, monthly results
EDUCATION
2023-2024
PGCE
Moreland University (Washington D.C, USA)
USA TEACH NOW teaching license preparation program
Course work and projects with a focus on culture of schooling, learning in a digital age, managing the learning environment, data driven instruction, role of families and technology for climate and culture of learning environment
- 3 months of clinical practice
2019-2021
Master of Applied Science: Engineering Science
Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada)
Research in Computer Networks, Machine Learning, and Big Data
Honors and awards: Athena Pathways Scholarship, FAS Graduate Fellowship
2011-2015
Bachelor of Science: Electrical Engineering
Pennsylvania State University (University Park, PA, USA)
The Recipient of Bolashak International Scholarship for high-performing students from Kazakhstan
Dean's list: 2012-2015
• Boston University, Center of English Language and Orientation Program, Boston, MA, May 2010 ‑ February 2011
• National University of Singapore, Singapore, Semester Abroad Spring 2014
CERTIFICATIONS
Toastmasters International: Competent Communicator, Competent Leader
Besides technology, I like:
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
and PROJECTS
Melbourne, Australia, October 2021
“K. Bekshentayeva and Lj. Trajkovic, ”Detecting Denial of Service attacks using echo state networks, ” in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
• Applied echo state networks to detect known DoS and DDoS attacks
• Used network intrusion datasets and collected border gateway protocol data for largest DDoS attacks in 2019‑2020 to evaluate the echo state network models
Daegu‑Gyeongju, South Korea, May 2021
“A. L. Gonzalez Rios, K. Bekshentayeva, M. Singh, S. Haeri, and Lj. Trajkovic, ”Virtual Network Embedding for Switch‑Centric Data Center Networks, ” IEEE Int. Symp. Circuits
and Systems
• Used D‑ViNE, R‑ViNE, GRC, GRC‑M, Monte Carlo Tree Search based algorithms MaVEn‑S and MaVEn‑M
• Compared the performance of algorithms with switch‑centric DCN topologies based on acceptance ratio, resources utilization, revenue to cost ratio, and processing time
Seville, Spain, October 2020
A. L. Gonzalez Rios, Z. Li, K. Bekshentayeva, and Lj. Trajkovic, “Detection of denial of service attacks in communication networks,” IEEE Int. Symp. Circuits and Systems
• Employed CSE‑CICIDS2018, CICIDS2017 data sets to create anomaly detection model using Broad Learning System
• Evaluated the performance based on accuracy, F‑score, and training time
Network Intrusion Detection Using Various Deep Learning Approaches (Computer Science: machine learning project)
Main responsibilities: Evaluated the performance of echo-state network, long short-term memory, feed-forward neural network models to detect network intrusions
Achievements: Obtained high accuracy and F1 while testing on CIC-IDS2018 data set
SVMs for Novelty Detection
Main responsibilities: focusing on a variant of SVM designed for use when only data from a single class is available, known as a one-class SVM. The goal of one-class SVM is to predict whether a new test data point belongs to the class or not – this problem is known as outlier detection, novelty detection or anomaly detection; outliers or anomalies are examples that do not fit in with the rest of the data. So, a one-class SVM assumes all/most of data points in the training set are normal and at test time predicts if the new test data point is normal.
Achievement: Found optimal hyperplane and constraints, derived the expression that shows the margin in one-class SVM, finding a threshold η so that about 7% of the training data are classified as outliers.
Exploring several autoencoder architectures using MNIST dataset
Main responsibilities: implementing the architecture of the encoder and decoder, training and visualizing of the result.
Review classification and sentiment analysis using BERT, logistic regression, and VADER.
Main responsibilities: A large number of reviews do not contain “stars” (ratings); moreover, rating may not accurately reflect the sentiment of the text review. In order to solve these issues I created a model
that can classify patient reviews of doctors and predict sentiment of any given review. For comparison I used unsupervised and supervised approaches such as BERT: "tf_bert_for_sequence_classification"
(sentiment analysis based on text review), logistic regression review classification as well as VADER (tool available under MIT license). Patient reviews were taken from: Doctify and iWantGreatCare (UK),
3Healthgrades (USA)
Main achievements: the models were able to predict sentiments (depending on the review sources
used, the F1 varied between 92% to 97%) as well as classify the ratings with high accuracy.
Countries, Cities, Affiliations disambiguation and translation
Main responsibilities: Having ~78K countries, 620K cities, ~71M of affiliations (extracted from PubMed) the goal was to disambiguate and normalize using various techniques: clustering, regex, translation, location tagger.
Achievements: Successfully disambiguated countries to 200, cities to 6K, affiliations to 20M
Author name disambiguation (final steps)
Main responsibilities: After BERT-based and random forest disambiguation and mapping the goal was to further disambiguate author’s name using fuzzy harmonic mean ratio and other related scoring
Achievements: successfully disambiguated and finalized authors’ names.
Mentoring (nonprofit) experience
USA GSO Troop Leader, STEM Master
Facilitated troop meetings by guiding decision‑making of hands‑on activities appropriate to members’ interests and abilities. Conducted all troop activities safely by adhering to GS Safety Activity Checkpoints and Volunteer Essentials procedures.
AI4ALL Program Mentor
During the program, thirty 9-12 grades female students were immersed in AI through a combination of lectures, hands‑on research projects, and mentoring activities facilitated by me and other co‑mentor.
Technovation Group Mentor
Mentored first‑year undergraduate studentswho developed a smartphone application that aimed to decrease the suicide rate among Kazakhstani
teens, awarded the 2nd place in the nation‑wide competition.