Hello ;-)

I have joined the Cloud Foundations Group at IBM Research Haifa as a Research Staff Member in 2013. Surprisingly, this was my last year of using Java professionally, though I have continued to follow its development closely.

Since 2014, I have had the opportunity to help build Watson Developer Cloud as tech lead of a small team, initially being responsible for key parts of its distributed systems infrastructure. This has allowed me to gain first-hand experience of Site Reliability Engineering, which, in turn, has led me to move up the stack to figure out how simple machine learning and statistical techniques can help SREs make better sense of vast amounts of monitoring data.

For some time, my focus has been two-fold (pun intended). I have continued to work on operational analytics, or AIOps as it called now, to develop tools for SREs and NREs that improve the accuracy of monitoring alerts, enhance alerts with more actionable information and help with root cause analysis by applying statistical and machine learning techniques to telemetry data about system operation. In addition, I have had a chance to build tools that help machine learning engineers with some of the issues around the productionisation of machine learning applications.

A few interests I am keen to learn more about and spend time working on:

  • the entire stack of issues arising when squeezing value of of data, all the way from Big Data processing infrastructure to statistics, machine learning and visualisation,
  • Exascale Computing,
  • Quantum Computing,
  • EdTech,
  • Systems Biology, Predictive, Preventative, Personalised Healthcare.

What motivates me is a general sense of curiosity and the desire to solve real pain points. I would like to build tools that can help accelerate the discovery of knowledge to relieve suffering and improve lives. A tall order and I have not figured out yet how to get there, but it is something to aspire to. This and: autonomy, challenge, purpose, responsibility, teamwork.

I am quite pleased to have been awarded a PhD in Computer Science from University College London in 2012 and, almost a decade before that, an MSci in Computer Science with Cognitive Science.

I like Python and Java, vim and tmux, vagrant and Docker, machine learning, big data and AI.