---
type: page
url: /pages/about
title: About Me
---

I'm James, I am a Chief Technology Officer and Software Engineer specialising in Machine Learning and in particular, Natural Language Processing. I am an amateur musician, cook and photographer and I love to read fiction and watch box sets and movies. I live with my wife and cats in the south of England.

 - [What I do for work](#what-i-do-for-work)
 - [What I do for fun](#what-i-do-for-fun)

## What I do for work

 - I've been freelancing and [building websites](https://web.archive.org/web/20051102052726/http://www.simssource.net/) since the mid 00s
 - I started my full time career at IBM in 2011 in their [CICS transaction processing product](https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/cics) before moving over to Watson where I was a customer-facing solutions architect which entailed helping other techies to use Watson APIs and services. 
 - In 2016 I left IBM to co-found [Filament](https://filament.ai), an AI & ML consultancy where I am currently CTO and Chief Data Scientist. 
 - I work for Filament 4 days a week, I oversee and manage our technical roadmap and strategy but I also keep my hands dirty and regularly deliver code for customers and for our products. 
 - I am also wrapping up my part time PhD which I've been working on under the dual supervision of [Prof. Maria Liakata](https://www.turing.ac.uk/people/researchers/maria-liakata) at the [Alan Turing Institute](https://www.turing.ac.uk/) [Dr Amanda Clare](https://users.aber.ac.uk/afc/) at Aberystwth University (where I finished my BSc in 2013). 
 - My main affiliation is with [University of Warwick](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/) but I often crash Turing events and I've been known to visit Aberystwyth to give talks at careers events and departmental seminars.


## What I do for fun

 - I'm a big fan of food - both cooking and eating it.
 - I like to tinker with software and hardware (like [this talking moose head](/2016/06/05/blackgangpi-a-raspberry-pi-hack-at-blackgang-chine/)) in my spare time. I'm a big fan of open source culture including efforts to decentralise the web like [indieweb](https://indieweb.org/) and [the fediverse](https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse).
 - I like to read, frequently science fiction and fantasy but the occasional pop-sci title or general fiction. I have historically tracked some of my reading over at [Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4547536-james-ravenscroft) but I plan to start tracking this stuff here via [indiebookclub](https://indiebookclub.biz/) and micropub.
 - I like to watch box sets and movies - my wife and I are [Cineworld Unlimited card](cineworld.co.uk/) holders.
 - I've been playing saxophone (Alto and Tenor mainly) off-and-on since the early 2000s. I can also play a few chords on a guitar and I'll happily tinker with a piano/keyboard, harmonica and clarinet although don't ask me to play you a full track!
 - Although I've not had time recently I did really enjoy [Lindyhop](/2015/06/28/bedford-place-vintage-festival/) - a 1920s style swing dance.