Illia Polosukhin is an artificial intelligence researcher and software engineer, best known as the Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, a layer one blockchain protocol that allows the creation and execution of decentralized applications and smart contracts.

Early Life & Education

Polosukhin holds a Master’s degree in Applied Math and Computer Science from the National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute”, institution where he also studied his undergraduate studies. ^{[1] [4]}
He is a fan of Russian science fiction literature and particularly enjoys reading the works of Heinlein and Asimov. ^[7]

Career

Started his career as a software engineer at Salford Systems, where he was in charge of the development of new tools for big data predictive analytics, text mining, geo mining, and the refinement of the existing Salford Predictive Miner toolkit. ^[1]
Afterwards, at Google Research, Polosukhin managed a team of researchers focused on Deep Learning and Natural Language Understanding. He also worked on TensorFlow (specifically TF.Learn, also known as SKFlow). ^[1]

NEAR Protocol

In 2017, Illia Polosukhin co-founded NEAR with Alexander Skidanov. The original name was “Near.ai”. The idea for NEAR began with Illia's participation in programming competitions during his high school and college years. ^[3]

"Is not starting something that makes me proud, but executing a vision of what that can be. That’s definitely what I’m proud of."

The team delved into research on smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain technologies as they searched for a suitable platform to build their applications. However, they were unable to find one that met their needs, leading them to develop NEAR Protocol to fulfill their desired requirements. ^[3]

Investments

Polosukhin has made around nine investments, which include Clear Street, 3Box, Kurtosis, ClayStack, Syndicate, KYVE, SEDA, Datrics, and 1inch. ^[2]