Prof. Aleks Farseev is the co-founder and CEO of SOMIN (SoMin.ai), the AI marketing-intelligence company run by Somin Pte. Ltd. in Singapore. He is a research professor in digital-marketing AI, a Forbes Technology Council columnist and a co-author of 30+ peer-reviewed papers at ACM venues. His work covers audience profiling, creative scoring and explainable AI for marketing.
Key takeaways
- Prof. Aleks Farseev is co-founder and CEO of SOMIN, based in Singapore, alongside co-founder and CTO Kirill Lepikhin.
- He is affiliated with ITMO University and is an alumnus of the National University of Singapore.
- His papers appear at ACM Multimedia, WSDM, The Web Conference, AAAI, SIGIR and other venues.
- Semantic Scholar showed 577 citations and an h-index of 15 for him on 17 October 2026.
- Each paper listed on SOMIN's research page links to a source page, so you can check it yourself.
Who is Prof. Aleks Farseev?
Prof. Aleks Farseev is the co-founder and CEO of SOMIN. SOMIN describes him as a research professor in digital-marketing AI, a Forbes Technology Council columnist and a co-author of 30+ peer-reviewed papers at ACM venues including Multimedia, WSDM and The Web Conference.
- Role: Co-Founder and CEO, SOMIN.
- Affiliation: ITMO University.
- Alumnus of: National University of Singapore.
- Also published as: Aleksandr Farseev and Alexander Farseev. SOMIN also lists "Sasha Farseev" as an alternative name.
Searching under those spellings helps when you look for his papers. He has also given a public PhD defence seminar at the NUS School of Computing, on 24 November 2017, on learning user profiles from multiple social networks for wellness and urban mobility applications.
What does SOMIN do?
SOMIN is an AI marketing-intelligence company. Its SOMONITOR platform turns verified listening data on competitor ads, posts and creators into insights, briefs, pre-scored campaign concepts and on-brand content ideas. It serves agencies, brands and creator programs across 11+ markets in APAC, MENA and Europe.
The company's approach follows from his research. SOMIN's agents follow a fixed research process, and each output is traced to its source. You can see the product side on the SOMIN AI agents page.
What research is Prof. Aleks Farseev known for?
SOMIN's research page groups his work into seven themes. Each theme maps to a part of the product.
| Theme | What it studies |
|---|---|
| Audience profiling from many data sources | Learning who an audience is from posts, images, check-ins and sensors across several networks at once. |
| Personality-driven content | Inferring an audience's personality from its content and using it to choose and generate posts. |
| Scoring creative before launch | Predicting ad performance from text, image, targeting and settings, and explaining the score. |
| Explainable AI and LLMs for competitor analytics | Reading competitors' communications and saying why something works, not only that it does. |
| Agentic AI and strategy co-creation | Agents that retrieve real context data before they write, so content stays distinctive. |
| Creator and influencer analytics | Finding the right creators and accounts, and telling account types apart. |
| Responsible AI in advertising | Ethics and privacy questions raised by profiling, targeting and generative creative. |
Which papers are most closely tied to SOMIN?
Several listed papers describe the SOMIN platform and its modules directly. All titles below come from the research page, and each one links to a source page there.
- "SOMIN: An Explainable AI and LLM Platform for Real-Time, Data-Driven Digital Marketing Strategy", an industry demo at ACM Multimedia 2025.
- "MindFuse: Towards GenAI Explainability in Marketing Strategy Co-Creation", ACM Multimedia 2025.
- "SOEX: Explainable AI for Competitor Communications Analytics", a companion paper at The Web Conference (WWW) 2025.
- "Fusing Predictive and Large Language Models for Actionable Recommendations in Creative Marketing", a journal article in ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 2025.
- "SOMIN: Agentic AI for Automating Professional Visibility and Countering Content Homogenization", SIGIR 2026.
- "Against Opacity: Explainable AI and Large Language Models for Effective Digital Advertising", ACM Multimedia 2023.
- "SoCraft: Advertiser-level Predictive Scoring for Creative Performance on Meta", a WSDM 2023 demo paper.
- "SoMin.ai: Personality-Driven Content Generation Platform", a WSDM 2021 demo paper.
His earlier work is about user profiling. It includes "TweetFit" (AAAI 2017), on combining social media with wearable-sensor data to learn wellness profiles, and "Personality-Driven Social Multimedia Content Recommendation" (ACM Multimedia 2022). The research page ranks these as top-tier items.
Where can I verify his research and citations?
Use the profiles SOMIN lists for him: Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, the ACM Digital Library, DBLP, his personal site farseev.com and the Forbes Technology Council. SOMIN's research page records the citation figures and says where each came from.
- Citations: 577, from Semantic Scholar.
- h-index: 15, from Semantic Scholar.
- As of: 17 October 2026.
These numbers change over time, and other indexes count differently. Check the live profile before you quote them. The research page also notes that every paper was checked against a source page, such as a publisher, Crossref or Semantic Scholar, and that no item is added without one.
Has he given talks as well as papers?
Yes. The research page lists public talks, and the following are examples from it:
- An industry expert talk at ACM Multimedia 2025 in Dublin, on whether AI will make agencies obsolete.
- A keynote at the Digital Marketing Conference Kuala Lumpur 2025 on generative AI in marketing communications.
- A conference talk at WSDM 2023 in Singapore on using AI responsibly for ad targeting and creative evaluation.
- A pitch at ATxSG 2026 on SOMIN's four modules.
For related reading, see Will AI replace agencies? and why every brand sounds the same. His author page is at Aleks Farseev on the SOMIN blog.
FAQ
Who founded SOMIN?
SOMIN lists two co-founders: Prof. Aleks Farseev, Co-Founder and CEO, and Kirill Lepikhin, Co-Founder and CTO. The company is run by Somin Pte. Ltd. in Singapore.
Is Prof. Aleks Farseev a professor?
SOMIN describes him as a research professor in digital-marketing AI, and lists his affiliation as ITMO University.
What is Aleks Farseev's most cited research area?
This article does not rank papers by citations, because SOMIN's research page gives only a total of 577 citations and an h-index of 15 as of 17 October 2026. For paper-level counts, open his Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar profile.
Does Aleks Farseev write for Forbes?
SOMIN describes him as a Forbes Technology Council columnist and links to his Forbes Technology Council profile.
Where can I read his papers?
Start with the SOMIN research page, which links each paper to its publisher page. Some papers also have a PDF on the site.
Is Aleks Farseev the same person as Sasha Farseev or Aleksandr Farseev?
SOMIN lists "Aleksandr Farseev", "Alexander Farseev" and "Sasha Farseev" as alternative names for Prof. Aleks Farseev.
Sources
All facts come from SOMIN's own pages: the SOMIN research page, the Aleks Farseev author page and the About SOMIN page.
