brainsteam.co.uk/brainsteam/content/pages/about.md

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page /pages/about About Me

I'm James, I am a 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

  • I've been freelancing and building websites since the mid 00s
  • I started my full time career at IBM in 2011 in their CICS transaction processing product 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, 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 at the Alan Turing Institute Dr Amanda Clare at Aberystwth University (where I finished my BSc in 2013).
  • My main affiliation is with University of Warwick 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) in my spare time. I'm a big fan of open source culture including efforts to decentralise the web like indieweb and the 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 but I plan to start tracking this stuff here via indiebookclub and micropub.
  • I like to watch box sets and movies - my wife and I are Cineworld Unlimited card 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 - a 1920s style swing dance.