Halvard RamstadInteresting fact(s): Launched his own online course in MLOps that garnered more than 40,000 active students. Former amateur MMA fighter and renowned dumpling maker.
TL;DR
Introducing one our software engineering team, Chris Samiullah. Chris has worked a range of technical projects in Healthtech, fintech, consulting, and mining.
What did you do before Livv?
I actually studied business first, I completed my MSc in International Business and Management at the University of Manchester in the UK.
I worked briefly in consulting, but then I got an exciting opportunity to join the graduate programme at Bupa, a large health insurance company.
This led my to a become a Technical Development Manager and moving to China permanently. It was an awesome experience to setup medical clinics from scratch (I looked after the digital workstream), learn Chinese and also to understand how business is done overseas in China.
How did you become interested in computer science and what led you to Livv Health?
I wanted to be more immersed in technology and therefore I learned to code in my spare time with the goal of being able to launch my own software projects one day.
While in China, I launched my first app, or side hustle if you’d like, which was an app for Jiu Jitsu training. This was the first thing I built that made some money and this also led me into the indie-hacking scene and being more immersed within the tech community. I begun running the Beijing Python meetup and met a lot of really cool people who inspired me.
Then I built an actual wearable device that included an accelerometer and gyroscope which could give users an idea of how to improve their training. This began my journey into machine learning.
After Bupa, I moved back to the UK and worked for a fintech company called Zopa, where I worked on productionizing machine learning models for credit risk assessments. It was a very risk-sensitive job and business model which taught me a lot about best practices around working with data and machine learning. For example ensuring that any prediction or analysis you make is reproducible - you always have a record of how and why you came to a particular conclusion. This is particularly important in a sector like healthcare.
Then I joined Babylon Health as a backend engineer. I was promoted to Technical Lead and later Engineering Manager. Babylon was a rocketship at the time and quickly grew from around 250 employees shortly after the Series B funding round when I joined to more than 3,000 people over the next few years.
I met our CEO, Sverre Sundsdal, while working at Babylon and this was one of the main reasons I joined Livv Health. Highlights from Babylon include growing the Healthcheck disease risk prediction product from prototype to millions of users in a dozen countries, and rearchitecting the Comprehensive Health Record system.
Why do you believe in Livv Health and what is the problem we are solving?
The main problem is ease of access to your health data, but also insights into your health that can help improve your life - either by catching risks early, or by helping you live more healthily.
If you can do this effectively, then the value to the user is enormous. Giving patients real agency over their health is an extremely exciting prospect.
Hobbies outside the office?
I love teaching others outside of work and I actually launched a course on Udemy a while back in AI & Machine learning. The course currently have roughly 40,000 active students enrolled.
Other than that I love to watch UFC, and I actually did martial arts actively for 15 years, although these days I mostly just go to the gym.
If you could have dinner with any historical figure, who would it be and why?
That has to be Alexander the great. It would be really interesting to understand the mind of the man who conquered half the known world before the age of 30.
Lastly, what do you envision the healthcare system will look like in the future?
I believe there will be radical improvements in pharmacology and drugs (think much more advanced than the current offerings such as Ozempic from Novo Nordisk).
For example I think the power of what drugs can do will be revolutionized, which could lead to ‘magic pills’ that will result in people not having to go to the gym anymore. I think we’ll effectively solve a lot of disease through genetic modification (aided by AI), meaning that a lot of health issues will be about mental health.
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