Boulder Dushanbe Sister Cities recently added a new board member - Anton Relin!
Anton was born in South Florida to Russian immigrants from Moscow and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, with bachelor's degrees in Linguistics, Computer Science, and Slavic Studies. Anton speaks English and Russian fluently and has done some translation work in Old Church Slavonic. He loves skiing, reading, going to symphony music and punk rock performances, hiking, and mixing a good cocktail or two.
Regarding his multiple degrees and professional interests, Anton said, “While Slavic Studies is something I studied out of interest for my own heritage, I attended Penn specifically because of the wonderful professors at the intersection of Computer Science and Language. Since middle school, I’ve recognized that while computers are becoming more and more affordable, technology remains inaccessible around the world due to lack of education in how to use it. My dream is to use voice technology as a solution to the accessibility problem, by providing voice interfaces that would allow anyone in the world to use technology without having an education barrier, closing the so-called ‘Digital Divide’.”
Before he became a board member, Anton was interested in BDSC because it allows him to maintain connections to the post-soviet space and culture into which he was born. As Boulder is a very monolithic city in terms of who lives there, BDSC is one of the only organizations in town that provides opportunities to engage with his cultural heritage.
Eventually, Anton would like to transition into work that is directly related to closing the digital divide. Whether that would be working for Google’s artificial intelligence labs in Accra, Ghana, or a different role in his current company. Anton says, “I want to make technology accessible to everyone.”
Anton’s most interesting factoid about himself is that he once accidentally gave himself cyanide poisoning by eating too many apples. Anton warned us, “Don’t eat the apple cores folks!”
