Ilia Shakhov

I am a higher-education operations specialist with a Master’s degree with honours in NLP and language technologies, and a Bachelor’s degree in English education. At HSE University, I support academic processes, data quality, reporting, and digital workflow improvement for students and faculty. I also build Python-based RAG and LLM tools for educational content and institutional knowledge.

I am interested in practical AI tools that support independent language learning and make information easier to use.

Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Saint Petersburg, Russia

Lead Expert Sep 2024–present

Support regulated academic processes, including admission, transfers, reinstatement, academic leave, dismissal, and completion. Maintain accurate records in university information systems; monitor academic deadlines and assessment processes; and prepare reports on enrolment, academic performance, faculty workload, and assessment participation. Work with faculty, academic offices, and other departments to resolve data and process issues.

Contribute to the automation and digitalisation of academic administration.

Analyst Feb 2024–Aug 2024

Prepared academic-process reports and analytical summaries. Monitored programme schedules, assessment milestones, student data, and information-system accuracy. Supported updates to internal regulations and coordinated the resolution of operational and data-quality issues across departments.

Head of Master’s Programme Study Office Sep 2023–Feb 2024

Coordinated academic support for Master’s programmes, including schedules, interim and final assessments, student records, faculty communication, and programme reporting. Allocated work within the study office, monitored deadlines and service quality, handled complex student and faculty enquiries, and prepared statistics and analytical summaries for programme management.

Study Office Document Specialist Aug 2022–Aug 2023

Supported local and international students through admissions and academic-record processes. Maintained electronic and paper student files, prepared orders and official documents, issued certificates, processed grade sheets, and used corporate student-information systems and the Electronic Document Management System. Coordinated requests with faculty and other university units.

VFS Global, Saint Petersburg, Russia

Visa Officer Oct 2021–Feb 2022

Advised clients on visa-document requirements, checked applications for completeness and accuracy, processed files, and provided customer support in a deadline-driven environment.

Across these roles, I progressed from document and student-record support to academic operations, analytics, cross-department coordination, and digital process improvement.

Higher School of Economics

Master’s Degree with Honours, Natural Language Processing and Language Technologies in Business and Education, 2026.

Research on an agentic pipeline for visual-novel script generation accepted for presentation at AINL 2026.

Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University

Bachelor’s Degree, Foreign Language Teacher (English), 2021.

Additional training: Python for Data Extraction and Processing; Business Process Analysis and Optimisation (BPMN); Natural Language Processing with Classification and Vector Spaces; Machine Learning and AI courses.