GenAI CEO · Professor in AI · Keynote Speaker

Prof. Aleks Farseev

Where deep AI research meets the marketing frontier.

Founder & CEO of SOMIN.ai. Guest Professor at NUS and INSEAD. Building the bridge from academic machine learning to agentic, explainable AI marketing — and playing the accordion along the way.

Singapore · London · Hong Kong
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SOMIN has worked with leading global agencies & brands

McDonald'siProspect · DentsuHavas MediaOMD · OmnicomDigitas · PublicisMullenLoweWavemakerMindshareMediaCom · GroupM

About

An entrepreneur and researcher, turning theory into scale.

Prof. Aleksandr Farseev earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore, where his research pioneered multi-view user profiling — synthesising fragmented, noisy signals across social networks into coherent, predictive models of human behaviour.

Today he leads SOMIN.ai as Founder & CEO, translating that research into a generative-AI platform for modern marketers. He is a Guest Professor at NUS and INSEAD, a Research Professor at ITMO University, and a Marketing & Advertising Community Leader at the Forbes Technology Council.

  • Ph.D. in Social Media AI — NUS School of Computing (2013–2017)
  • Guest Professor — INSEAD & National University of Singapore
  • Research Professor — ITMO University · Faculty at SUSS
  • Columnist & Community Leader — Forbes Technology Council
  • Founder — Accordion Singapore · professional accordionist
  • Father of three · performs on stages worldwide

Impact at a glance

Cited, shipped and recognised.

23
h-index
on Google Scholar — sustained scholarly influence
30+
Publications
peer-reviewed papers at top-tier venues (ACM MM, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM)
4
Major awards
Gartner, Echelon, SBR and Web Science honours
1
US Patent
filed — LLM-based insight generation & action recommendation

Citation totals grow continually — figures above emphasise durable metrics. See Google Scholar for live counts.

Research · Academia

Foundational profiling work, now powering GenAI.

From multimodal sensor fusion to cross-network recommendation, Aleks's academic work laid groundwork that today underpins retrieval-augmented and agentic AI systems. His recent research targets the barriers to enterprise LLM adoption: hallucination and opacity.

Research themes

01

Multi-View User Profiling

Synthesising signals across social networks into coherent, predictive models of behaviour.

02

Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Linking digital social signals to real-world physical behaviour and wellness.

03

Cross-Network Recommendation

Clustering disparate data vectors — an early blueprint for RAG architectures.

04

GenAI Explainability

Constraining LLM outputs and detecting hallucination for reliable deployment.

On Google Scholar

h-index 23

Author of 30+ peer-reviewed publications, cited in hundreds of academic works. Citation figures update over time — the live, citation-tracked list lives on Google Scholar.

Selected honours

  • Web Science Trust — Person of the Year (user profiling)
  • NUS VaSCo Award · Dean's Research Excellence Award (2017)
  • Invited speaker — NUS, NTU, INSEAD, Bournemouth University
  • ACM Multimedia 2025 — Industry Keynote

Selected publications

A selection from 30+ peer-reviewed works.

Titles retained in their original language. See Google Scholar for the complete, citation-tracked list.

2025MindFuse: Towards GenAI Explainability in Marketing Strategy Co-CreationACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '25)
2025SOEX: Explainable AI for Competitor Communications AnalyticsThe Web Conference (WWW '25), Companion
2024SoMonitor: Explainable Marketing Data Processing & Analysis with Large Language ModelsarXiv:2407.13117
2023Against Opacity: Explainable AI and LLMs for Effective Digital AdvertisingACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '23)
2023Automated Insight Generation & Action Recommendation Based Upon LLMs, ML and Generative AIUS Patent Application — USPTO
2022Personality-Driven Social Multimedia Content RecommendationACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '22)
2022Do We Behave Differently on Twitter and Facebook? Multi-View User Personality ProfilingFrontiers in Big Data
2021SoMin.ai: Personality-Driven Content Generation PlatformACM Conf. on Web Search & Data Mining (WSDM '21)
2019A Whole New Ball Game: Harvesting Game Data for Player ProfilingAAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19)
2018SoMin.ai: Social Multimedia Influencer Discovery MarketplaceACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '18)
2017Tweet Can Be Fit: Wearable Sensors & Social Networks for Wellness Profile LearningACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
2017Cross-Domain Recommendation via Clustering on Multi-Layer GraphsACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR '17)
2016bBridge: A Big Data Platform for Social Multimedia AnalyticsACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '16)
2015Harvesting Multiple Sources for User Profile Learning: A Big Data StudyACM Int. Conf. on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR '15)

Ventures · Industry

From lab to launch — AI that ships.

SOMIN.ai — Founder & CEO

A new-generation platform that empowers marketers to build strategy and run campaigns with generative AI. Its Omni-Sourced User Profiling and Long-Tail Interest Targeting anchor predictions in industry-verified data on Meta and Google — turning weeks of manual planning into minutes, and lifting real campaign performance.

13 min
Brief analysis
campaign planning accelerated up to 12× — from weeks to minutes
78%
CTR accuracy
3× more accurate than baseline human estimation
+38%
Campaign performance
average uplift in digital advertising performance
Return on ad spend
client outcome — McDonald's, +438% quality reach

DEFY Group — Fractional CTO & Board Member

Taking DEFY's technology and AI strategy to the next level.

Ecosystem & infrastructure

Certified Google ISV and Google for Startups Accelerator alumnus; selected for Meta's inaugural Llama Incubator in APAC. SOMIN runs proprietary ML on Google Cloud with Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Intellectual property

Named inventor on a filed US patent for automated insight generation and action recommendation based on LLMs, machine learning and generative AI.

Talks · Keynotes · Lectures

On stages from INSEAD to ATxSG.

Aleks is an international keynote speaker on generative AI, marketing and the future of advertising — lecturing at business and technical schools and headlining industry conferences worldwide.

Recognition · In the press

Backed by analysts, adjudicators and the trade press.

Gartner Cool Vendor

AI for Marketing, 2020

Echelon Top 10 Startups

e27, 2025 — MarTech & GenAI

SBR National Business Award

Computer Software, 2022

Web Science Person of the Year

Social-media user profiling

Featured in

Thought leadership

On the shift from content creators to AI facilitators.

As a columnist and Community Leader at the Forbes Technology Council, Aleks argues that to stay relevant, marketers must evolve from manual content creators into curators of autonomous AI tools — and that model size matters far less than technique and fit.

Essays at Forbes

Music · Accordion

A second stage: the accordion.

Beyond AI, Aleks — also known as Sasha — is one of Singapore and Southeast Asia's most renowned accordionists and the founder of the Accordion Singapore community. Through A&A Music Academy, a violin-and-accordion duo with Prof. Alexander Souptel, former Concertmaster of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, he has performed at the Esplanade, Victoria Concert Hall and on stages around the world.

More than a performance act, Accordion Singapore reaches out to educate the public on accordion culture — and A&A teaches the next generation of players.

500+
Performances since 1990
Esplanade, Victoria Concert Hall and stages worldwide
100+
Students taught
several with prestigious international awards of their own
Award-winning
International competitions
repeat winners of international music awards

Faith Driven

Building for more than margins.

Aleks serves as an APAC / Southeast Asia Ambassador for the Faith Driven Entrepreneur movement and helps gather Christ-following founders across the region to worship, learn and build together.

SOMIN.ai is part of DMV Redemptive Labs, the accelerator of Digital Mission Ventures, which backs early-stage founders using their business for lasting, positive impact. That conviction shapes the work — Aleks is intentional about the industries he serves.

Rooted in the Orthodox Christian tradition, Aleks is also part of Singapore's Orthodox Christian community.

582M
Entrepreneurs worldwide
an estimated 180M are Christ-following
1
Community, one calling
gathering founders monthly, online and in person

Connect

Let's build something.

For speaking, advisory, research collaboration, performance bookings or partnerships.

Contact Aleks

Find Aleks online