About
“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” — Isaac Asimov, First Law of Robotics
When I was a child reading Asimov’s robot stories in Russia, I never imagined I’d one day be working on the kinds of systems he wrote about. But here we are—and his First Law still guides how I think about technology.
Hello!
I’m Ekaterina Krivich, a PhD student at Tallinn University in Estonia. My research lives at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, deep learning, and causal inference, with a focus on affective computing—teaching machines to understand human emotions.
Before diving into research, I spent many years as a software developer building distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native applications. I’m a functional programming enthusiast who believes elegant code can change how we think about problems.
These days, I’m fascinated by how we can make AI systems that genuinely help people—systems that follow something like Asimov’s Laws, not because they’re programmed to, but because we’ve designed them thoughtfully from the start.
Selected Projects
Here are some things I’ve built that I’m proud of:
Research & AI Tools
Hacker News Semantic Search — A semantic search engine for 38.8 million Hacker News items using FAISS and sentence embeddings. Ask questions in natural language instead of keywords.
Savvy Phrase — A Go CLI tool that settles grammar debates by checking which phrase is more commonly used online. Built for language learners and the perpetually uncertain.
Developer Tools
SeoTracker — A Ruby gem for tracking website rankings across Google and Yandex. My most starred project—apparently other people also obsess over their search positions.
StandUp Bot — A Slack bot that collects and retrieves standup messages. Simple, but it solved a real problem for distributed teams.
ActiveAdmin PORO Decorator — Bringing Plain Old Ruby Objects to ActiveAdmin, because sometimes you just want clean, testable decorators.
More Explorations
I’m always tinkering with something—from podcast transcription tools to Elixir experiments to solving LeetCode problems. You can find all 176+ repositories on my GitHub.
Teaching & Community
I believe technology should be understandable by everyone. That’s why I’ve worked with ITTalent to teach technical recruiters—helping bridge the gap between tech and the people who connect us with opportunities.
Why “First Law”?
Asimov’s Laws of Robotics were never meant to be a complete ethical framework. They were a storytelling device—a way to explore what happens when rules meet reality. But the First Law captures something important: technology should help, not harm.
As we build increasingly powerful AI systems, I think about this a lot. Not because I expect robots to follow rules, but because we need to design systems with human wellbeing at the center.
That’s what this site is about—exploring technology through the lens of someone who grew up dreaming about robots and is now helping build the future.
Let’s Connect
GitHub: github.com/kiote
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kiote
Email: [email protected]