Hey, I'm Sergey Slotin. Friends call me Sereja (/sɪr̥ʲɵʐə/).
I'm an independent computer scientist interested in algorithm design, machine learning, econometrics, applied cryptography and game theory.
I'm currently working on electronic voting protocol analysis and electoral statistics for upcoming Russian elections.
I wrote a performance engineering book Algorithms for Modern Hardware and in the process designed the world's fastest binary search, B-tree, number parser, integer factorization, and many array-processing SIMD primitives.
I also wrote Algorithmica, an online textbook used by ~half of Russian-speaking CS students, and helped establish what became T-Generation and Yandex Kruzhok, which teach competitive programming to talented high schoolers and produce most of the ROI medalists, and I myself was once ranked in the top 3 of my cohort.
I don't regularly teach anymore but I speak at conferences.
I effectively dropped out after the first year of MIPT for an accelerated ML career.
I worked on speech services and ML infrastructure at Replika, improved the quality of image search at Yandex, and developed a speech recognition kit and a voice assistant at T-Bank, and ran a short-lived AI startup in 2020 that was obliterated by the pandemic. Earning beyond my needs, I realized that I had no interest in money and could just work on what benefits society most.
I split my time between my home city of Moscow and Mahilioŭ in eastern Belarus, which is convenient for economic and legal reasons. I mix learning with leisure, listen to ~100 audiobooks a year while meandering around town or playing games, and watch a lot of shows in foreign languages. Besides English and Russian, I speak Spanish and German (like a 7-year-old) and Mandarin and French (like a 4-year-old).
Last updated on July 18, 2026.