Kliment Serafimov
UWC Adriatic, 2013-2015
Hello! My name is Kliment. I was at UWC Adriatic from 2013 to 2015, and that experience showed me that the biggest change in society can happen through a fundamental revision of the education system. Because of my time at UWC, I, alongside Ana Arsovska, Bobo Stankovikj and Isidora Cvetkovska, organized two international summer camps called Networking 101: International Youth Networking Academy. Because of their success, I took a semester away from my studies at the Masachussetts Institute for Technology in the fall of 2016. Working with co-founder Stefan Lozanovski and teachers Slagjan Stankovikj and Dimitar Trenevski, we founder the School of the Future. It aims to improve education in Macedonia, which we've shown -- through personal example -- is both possible and fulfilling. For example, in the Junior Macedonian Math Olympiad in 2019, 16 of the 20 awarded medals went to our students. This success is the manifestation of UWC's motto: UWC makes education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future.
Aside from entrepreneurship in education, my other primary passion is research in artificial intelligence, algorithms and data structures. When I wrote this bio, I was interning at Microsoft Research and working on implementing neural networks under the mentorship of Alex Polozov. At MIT, I'm also an undergraduate researcher in Professor Joshua Tenenbaum's lab for computational cognitive science. As one of my projects in the lab, I mentored Martin Dinev, a student in the School of the Future, who implemented a pedagogical platform to teach algorithmic thinking to middle school students. With that project, Martin won a silver medal in the 2019 iteration of Infomatrix, and international project competition in Romania.
In my free time, I ride a bike, train mountain-climbing, and take walks in beautiful surroundings. I've noticed that I put a lot of emphasis on intense experiences, functional comfort, and cosmic symbolism. This lifestyle has natural brought adventurous and out-of-the-ordinary experiences. I'm also interested in topics like language philosophy, mind theory and social psychology.
For my future career, I plan to work on applying program synthesis in education, such as automatic review of exams/homeworks that require explanations. Similarly, in the other direction, I hope to use program synthesis as a pedagogical tool.
I'd be more than happy to hear about your interests, stories and ambitions! Feel free to contact me (my phone number: +1 617 650 5125, email: kliment@mit.edu, or on Facebook).