Jakub Konečný studied mathematics at Comenius University, Slovakia. In the past he represented his country in the International Mathematical Olympiad. Most recently, together with another student teammate, Konečný won second place in the ChaLearn Gesture Challenge – an international contest in designing a one-shot-learning gesture recognition system. Konečný was invited to present the results at the 21st International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Tsukuba, Japan, and to submit a paper describing the system to a special issue of the Journal of Machine Learning Research. His interests lie in the area of big data optimization and machine learning.