Nicolas S.

Nicolas Sursock has lived in Paris, France for 25 years, and was born in Beirut, Lebanon (1980). In 1983, his parents went to France because of the civil war, and Nicolas was educated in France (EFREI, Telecom ParisTech). Often he spends his time between France, Lebanon, and Switzerland with the occasional trip far away like UCLA, Los Angeles in the summer of 1998 where he studied astronomy. Nicolas is a big fan of Apple and only uses Mac machines. Which doesn’t mean he didn’t sometimes have to use a Windows machine for his work. Proud owner of a MacBook Pro, he is learning Swift after studying C++ as his first language. An enthusiast of object-oriented programming, he also knows how to program in Java. Nicolas is also learning Python at the moment and knows how to program Matlab. During his work, he also had to deal with SQL databases, XML files, MQSeries messaging, and Unix shell programming. At the moment, Nicolas is taking a little break after dedicating the last 7 years to music. In 2017, he started a music blog (WordPress and then Ghost). For 3 years, he programmed in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to customize his website. Blogging alone has made Nicolas aware of marketing, SEO, analytics, and business reporting. Still, he comes back to his first love which is coding and music. In 2003, during his final internship, Nicolas successfully ported a sound classification tool from Matlab to C++ at IRCAM, a well-known sound lab in Paris. The feature extraction module was translated and was optimized for speed. Shortly after, Nicolas worked in banking for 7 years and was able to leverage his object-oriented programming skills to do the work. In 2013, he had a short stint at a video company where he used FFmpeg to create video summaries. Nicolas’s values include trust, respect, curiosity, honesty, adaptability, and humor. He believes values can create a vision of the future and prevent nightmares at work. During his career, he wasn’t afraid to work extra hours to ensure the project’s quality, meet deadlines, and stay on budget. Outside of work, Nicolas likes to hang out in coffee shops, read a book, watch a movie or a documentary, play a game on the computer—he loves Starcraft and Diablo. You will also meet Nicolas in a restaurant eating his favorite Mediterranean dishes like pasta or Lebanese food. When he has time, Nicolas likes to meet a friend and laugh. During his career, Nicolas noticed how music touched the souls of people. That’s why he earned a Cosmik Debris award in 2010 after sharing a song that made unanimity. A song by Frank Zappa, Cosmik Debris tells the story of a psychic guru who can predict the future—prices will fluctuate and someone will go down. Talk about taking risks in life! PS: Nicolas has good exposure to signal/image processing & pattern recognition matters. PS2: Certificates from TestDome available upon request.