Papers

• Minimal Phenomenal Experiencea and the Synthetic Data Hypothesis

• NEAR: Neural embeddings for amino acid relationships, Bioinformatics, 2025

•  An analytical model of active inference in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, IWAI, 2023

• Spin glas systems as collective active inference, IWAI, 2023

• Epistemic communities under active inference, Entropy, 2022

• pymdp: A python library for active inference in discrete state space, The Journal of Open Source Software, 2022

• An investigation of the Free Energy Principle in Emotion Recognition, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 2019

Career

ML Engineer / Researcher at Softmax, 09/2023 - present

I joined Softmax as the third employee and have been with them through the entire process of the company being formed and developing into what it is today. We work on modeling basic learning for agents in collective systems. We’ve explored multiple approaches, and have converged on building multi-agent reinforcement learning policies to learn and cooperate in a simulated environment called Mettagrid. My role has mainly been an engineer and researcher, writing code and giving presentations on papers and literature, but I have also grown a lot as a team member in managerial work, helping onboard and coordinate within a growing startup.

Software Scientist at the Wheeler Lab, Univesity of Arizona, 01/2023 - 08/2024

The Wheeler Lab is a computational biology research lab. I worked on ML projects including:

• NEAR: An CNN-based model for protein homology detection

• DIPLOMAT: an ML animal tracking and behaviour analysis tool

I also served a a mentor for Masters students, and participated in research groups and literature reviews.

Research Associate (ML) at Birkbeck, University of London, 05/2022 - 09/2022

At Birkbeck, I worked primarily on a project which was a collaboration between Birkbeck and the Victoria&Albert museum, in which I fine-tuned a diffusion model on the museum’s collection and developed a platform to demo at an in-person exhibition and workshop. People could use the model to generate images that combined different themes and styles across the collection, to visualize artifacts that would be an intersection between them - for example, a ceramic vase made by Versace from the 17th century.

After this project, I worked with the mathematical finance department to build an NLP tool to detect green-washing in ESG bond documents.

Software Engineer at 9fin, 01/2022- 01/2023

9fin is a platform providing information about fixed icnome assets such as debt and bonds. My areas of work was mainly backend engineering, building a nd maintaining endpoints for for applicaiton, using AWS state machines and lambdas, as well as SQL and S3 for data management and boto3 for python client communication.

I also worked with computer vision and NLP, helping the legal team optimize their workflow by building a recommendation engine that parsed PDF documents and recommended text-tags.

ML Engineer at Nested Minds, 01/2021 - 01-2022

Nested Minds was an active inference start-up coming out of Karl Friston’s theoretical neurobiology group at UCL. I helped with all aspects of engineering, (algorithm design, generative models and back-end development and infrastructure) as well as team leadership, teaching and onboarding.

Noteable projects included Huxley: an AI diffusion algorithm used to create Duran Duran’s music video Invisible, and Disney Automatoy, a robot for Disney’s amusement park that engages in social interactions, detecting and replicating behaviours such as waving, facial expressions and clapping.