罗一阳's Insights

Paper Clusterer: An Obsidian Plugin for Research Note Organization

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paper Clusterer: Turn Your Obsidian Vault into a Research Map

The Problem: A Graveyard of Research Notes

My Obsidian vault had become a mess. Hundreds of paper notes, lecture materials, and research ideas—scattered across folders, poorly connected, and increasingly difficult to navigate. Sound familiar?

As researchers, we consume vast amounts of information. We take notes, highlight papers, jot down ideas. But without proper organization, this knowledge remains fragmented and underutilized.

From Sound to Meaning: Leveraging Audio Language Models for Music Relevance Assessment

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How foundation audio models and Audio LLMs bridge the gap between acoustic similarity and perceptual relevance

[AI for all] What is Intelligence?

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

[AI for all] What is Intelligence? 🤔

So what exactly is intelligence? Intelligence is what makes us “Homo sapiens” - literally wise humans, thinking beings. What makes us intellectual is the fact that we can expect that the result of our actions will lead us to achieve our goals.

But what makes machines intelligent? The same thing - their actions should lead to achieving their goals. The question is that we set the goals, and machines learn to optimize the process of achieving these goals in the best way. And we must be absolutely sure that we set the goals correctly, otherwise we can over-optimize, especially if (when?) we invent machines that will be much smarter than us and will quite be able to optimize us too :)

Beijing Car Visa: The Capital's Invisible Border

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Beijing Car Visa: The Capital’s Invisible Border

The role of capital cities is crucial in many countries, but in nations with governance structures similar to China—where the Party plays a leading role and the political system closely resembles the Soviet model—the capital’s role becomes particularly significant.

While Russians joke about the “rubber city” of Moscow and its hyper-centralization, moving to or even driving to Moscow isn’t particularly problematic. You can drive into Moscow with regional license plates without major issues.

Education in China: From Disappointment to Opportunity

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Education in China: From Disappointment to Opportunity

This might be a bit rambling, but here we go.

The Initial Dream

My biggest disappointment at that time was probably my university experience. One of my main motivations for coming to China to study was to continue developing in mechanical engineering—to see how Chinese engineers work and how factories operate.

Reality check: I didn’t set foot in a Chinese factory until 2024… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Thoughts on Learning Chinese

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Thoughts on Learning Chinese

Yes, I speak, write, and understand Chinese. On one hand—it sounds impressive. On the other—why bother, really?

The Practical Truth

For the most part, Chinese turned out to be useful more for personal development (and for talking with my wife—obviously :)). Is it frustrating that the language is barely needed at work? I think so. Though when it was needed, Chinese corporate culture always came as a bonus… I should probably write about that separately sometime.

About & Contact

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Nikolai Zakharov (罗一阳)

ML Engineer at VK AI, working with the Experimental Research Team on LLM + audio systems (since Jan 2026).

I build language models that understand audio and speech, bridging the gap between text and audio modalities. Based in Moscow after 10 years living in China, studying and working across telecom, fintech, and EVs (Huawei, Tinkoff, NIO). Prior to VK AI, I worked on recommender systems at VK Video (2025).

CV / Resume

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Nikolai Zakharov (罗一阳)

Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Multimodal / LLM)

Moscow, Russia (Open to China/Singapore/Global)
Tel: +86 136 2105 3870
Email: n.d.zakharov@outlook.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolai-zakharov-285841a7/
Website: https://yiyang92.github.io/

Download English CV (PDF) → | 下载中文简历 (PDF) →

Summary

Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Multimodal / LLM). 8+ years production AI at scale. Specialized in Audio LLMs, multimodal systems, inference optimization (vLLM, TensorRT). Delivered: captioning service for music recommendations (VK), RAG agents (+20%, NIO), voice synthesis (-88% latency, Tinkoff). Tsinghua MSc, 10 years China tech ecosystem. Fluent in Russian, English, Chinese.