About

I began my journey in Durban, South Africa. Kwa-Zulu Natal has a place deep in my heart and despite my complaints about the heat and rather drastic humidity, whenever I visit, I feel I am home. 

I studied Mechanical Engineering at what was then the University of Natal, because I was interested in robotics! While I required skills in electronics, programming and mechanical design, mech eng won because it was the most foreign to me. Engineering taught me how to think and problem solve and I went on to pursue a Masters in manufacturing automation, interrupted by a short sabatical in Atlanta, Georgia at Johnson R&D. After my Masters, industry drew me away from academia and I started my career in IT as a white hat hacker. Shortly thereafter the lucrative world of ERP (enterprise) development captured me for many years. I learnt a lot from ERP systems: architecting systems that have to transact huge volumes of data daily across multiple business modules and legacy systems; managing production systems while developing and deploying code to production via an intensive user/function/regression test process; the importance of good decoupled design, auditing logs and writing clean code. I gained business process knowledge and experience by occasionally taking on business analyst roles that provided important insight into the domains of manufacturing, procurement, warehousing, inventory management and finance. One of the key lessons I learnt from those roles was how to develop user-friendly applications, a skill that improved my capabilities as a developer. 

In an effort to improve and freshen my skillset, I pursued a few side projects that resulted in my eventual application for a PhD in ML. First, I developed a product to OCR invoices for automatic integration with ERP systems. Next, I took Andrew Ng's famous Introduction to Machine Learning course that filled in a few gaps and raised more questions. Finally, I became an organiser for the local chapter of the Google Developer Group and soon I was arranging talks with people across the IT industry, courses on cloud and ML and running study groups on Fast.ai. My friend and co-organiser, Dr Omer Dawelbeit, encouraged me pursue a PhD in ML. With no idea of a research topic or direction, I drew on my passion at the time, the boardgame Dominion. What fascinated me was the engine building skills required where the available actions in each game could be completely different every time. How would an ML algorithm manage to select actions and build engines effectively, especially in such a dynamic environment? This would be the focus of my PhD: how actions interact, what relationships exist between actions and how to find and exploit these relationships in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. 

Pleasure Activities

I enjoy reading, mostly non-fiction but I'm trying to get into more fiction now. I have an extensive collection of cookbooks as I enjoy cooking for various reasons: partly because food is such a large part of cultures and I love learning about cultures through food; partly because I like to know how to make things. We built our own clay oven after attending a weekend workshop. Cooking with a clay oven requires planning to make the most of the vast quantities of fuel consumed to get the oven up to temperature! It is a very satisfying experience to fire up an oven and cook over the course of a whole day, ending the day by drying fruit and tomatoes overnight in the remnants of the heat, having produced enough food to last you for days. 

While I love travelling, I enjoy spending enough time in a country or city to get a feel for the people and culture. It was a privilege to have this opportunity in my career where I travelled and worked with people across Europe. 

I love learning almost any skill: wood-working and using a router, weaving cloth, building lamp-shades, jewellery making, glass etching, building a treadmill desk, 3D printing items, to name a few.  I enjoy walking when the weather is good. I love swimming and snorkelling. 

A growing passion for the past 10 years has been boardgames. An abiding favourite is Dominion but I also love Puerto Rico, Pandemic Legacies, Istanbul - extended, Caylus, Quacks, Citadels, Settlers 2-player, Die Crew, Saboteur, Robo Rally and so on. I enjoy playing miniature golf on the Oculus Quest 2 every Sunday with family. I think virtual reality is a wonderful immersive medium!

Finally, I love movies and good TV series. My taste is very variable: I enjoy sci-fi and fantasy (Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel (Civil War was great), The Boyz, The Expanse, Firefly, Devs, etc.) but I also enjoy more light-hearted shows; I loved Ted Lasso and Moana.