Stage 1 Review Request: Exceptional Talent

Stage 1
1

Hi everyone!

I plan to apply for exceptional talent based on the following documents:

Letters of Recommendation

  • 1. CEO and Co-Founder of a startup where I’m working at the moment. I’m a Co-Founder & CTO. Our CEO has 15 years of experience in FinTech, including 10 years in managerial positions.
  • 2. CEO and Co-Founder of GAIA(Georgian AI Association) - Non-profit association of AI professionals and enthusiasts with a mission to support Georgia’s economic development by promoting the best use of AI in society and business. I am involved in some of their projects as an invited AI expert.
  • 3. Research Group Leader at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems - I conducted research under his supervision.

Mandatory Criteria

1. Honouree of the Forbes Georgia 30 Under 30

Description: Forbes 30 Under 30 is a list of leaders under 30 year from di5erent industries. It is published annually by Forbes magazine since 2011. This is prestigious award given in 40+ countries worldwide, including Georgia. Forbes Georgia is part of the global Forbes licensed publishing network.

2. Speaker on Tech & AI Events/Conferences/Webinars

Description: I have been invited as a speaker or panelist on tens of conferences, webinars and events in recognition of my expertise in AI. I have 3 specific event examples here with photos of me on the stage, links of events/agendas with my name, invitation email screenshots. These three events are -

  1. ICLR 2025 Social Event: Panelist
  2. Webinar organized by Toloka AI: Speaker
  3. Datafest Tbilisi 2024: Speaker

3. Judging Experience

Description: I’ve been invited as a judge to several tech competitions and hackathons because of my expertise in AI and digital product development. I have 3 specific examples with images, links and invitation emails.

  1. Jury member: Forbes 30 Under 30 (Technology & E-Commerce category), 2025
  2. Jury member: National AI Hackathon 2025
  3. Jury member: International AI Hackathon for Women 2025

4. Media Coverage

Description: My work in AI and digital product development has been recognised by several independent media and public platforms. I have 3 specific examples with images and screenshots of their invitations.

  1. The-tech.kz: Women in tech success stories - my interview
  2. BMG Coverage - BMG (Business Media Georgia) is a media platform in Georgia that deliveres business & economics news across TV, web and digital channels. They invited me on their main tv show as an expert of career in tech, gender equality in tech and as a tech employer.
  3. Interview at DevTherapy - DevTherapy is the biggest tech podcast in Georgia with 4k subscribers on youtube and 1000+ members in discord community.

I should choose two optional criteria out of these three, and I’d really appreciate your advice on which two to choose.

Optional Criteria 2

1. Teaching & Mentoring
Description: Outside my role as CTO of Helio AI, I support the AI ecosystem by mentoring students in national and international education programs. Examples include:

  1. Stanford Code in Place, where I served as a Tutor/Section Leader. Alternatively, I can replace this with my no-code AI course delivered with HIGGS AI and Tbilisi State University, focused on practical AI education for learners from different backgrounds.
  2. Georgian AI Association Student Research Club, where I mentor students working toward a scientific paper
  3. GITA programs, where I regularly mentor high school and university students on AI and startups.

2. Ecosystem Leadership
Description: I have 2 examples here.

  1. GAIA organizes annual events for the Georgian AI ecosystem, including award nominations. In 2025, I won the AI Educator Award.
  2. Besides participating in events and conferences, I also organize AI events. Last year, I organized a social event at ICLR 2025, one of the top three AI research conferences in the world.

3. AI Literacy Project
Description: As an AI expert, I was invited to contribute to the national AI Literacy Programme for high school students, organized by GAIA. The goal of the programme is to ensure that every student graduating from high school in Georgia knows how to use AI properly. In the pilot phase, we reached 15 schools across 4 cities in Georgia and around 150 students, in partnership with Google.

Optional Criteria 3

1. Significant contributions to the field
Description I am the Co-Founder & CTO of Helio AI, a product-led technology company building an AI agent for recruiters. Helio AI serves 450+ client companies across 7 countries and has raised around $1.5 million in investment to date. I am presenting my GitHub account to demonstrate my contribution, along with examples of core features built under my supervision. These examples show that I designed the software architecture for these features and led their implementation.

2. My role from others perspective
Description: In interviews, my co-founder and COO explicitly credits me as the technical lead responsible for the AI system at the core of the product. She states that, before I joined the team, she had been told that building such a model in Georgia would not be possible because no local engineer could handle the complexity of low-resource Georgian-language NLP. I am using one of these interviews as evidence.

**3. My contribution in Award Winning Feature"
Description: As CTO of Helio, I initiated and led an internal product sub-project that later won the CX Business Award, an external industry award recognizing excellence in customer experience. I am providing evidence of my contribution through GitHub, along with information about the award we won.

Optional Criteria 4
1. academic contributions through research
Description: I am a co-organiser of the EmoRec EEG Workshop at ACII 2024 (the 12th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, University of Glasgow, 15–18 September 2024), as well as the first author of a research paper in the same area and the creator of the open-source EmoRec-EEG framework released alongside it. I am providing my GitHub contributions to this framework and webpages about the workshop as evidence.

2. My Publications
Description: This evidence documents my peer-reviewed publication in the ECCV 2024 workshop programme, my Google Scholar citation record across two published papers (with 3 and 6 citations), and my formal role as an AI Researcher in the EU-funded GAIN project, under which this research was conducted.

3. Invitations at scientific conference events
Description:

  1. Invited Reviewer, WANT @ ICML 2024. In 2024, the programme chair committee of the 2nd Workshop on Advancing Neural Network Training: Computational Efficiency, Scalability, and Resource Optimization (WANT @ ICML 2024) formally invited me to serve as an OpenReview-verified reviewer.
  2. Organiser, ICLR 2025 social event. I was accepted as an organiser of an official social event at ICLR 2025.
  3. Invited Panelist at an ICLR 2025 social event. I was separately invited by independent organisers to serve as a panelist at an ICLR 2025-affiliated social event officially listed on the ICLR 2025 website.

I can replace some of the evidence with other examples, so I would really appreciate your feedback.
Thank you in advance!