My Group.
My group is an amazing little family of friendly, generous, smart people. We used to be all in the same place (Manchester) but we are now spread over the world.
We have worked on aspects of ensemble learning, feature selection/extraction, and information theoretic / probabilistic models for each of these. We have applied these to domains as diverse as bio-health informatics, adaptive compilers, and humanitarian issues around disaster scenarios. We’ve been sponsored in all this work by generous public sector organisations - including EPSRC, ESRC, and the EU, as well as private organisations including Arm Ltd and AstraZeneca.
I welcome applications for new PhDs - I strongly encourage you to read (fully) at least one of my publications before you even think of applying. I’m unlikely to return your email unless you demonstrate curiosity like this.
I also welcome Manchester UG/MSc project students into our group, should your project be aligned with our research interests - let’s chat.
Current & affiliated members
Postdoc, working on ensemble learning theory. Danny holds degrees in mathematics and computer science, and a PhD specialising in echo state networks. His current work is directed toward finding a statistical foundation for the concept of 'diversity' in ensemble learning.
PhD student, co-supervised with Dr David Wong. Sara holds degrees in physics & mathematics, and is currently working on ML for healthcare applications.
Kostas is an Honorary Research Fellow in the group. He is Associate Director of Data Science at Novartis, in the Advanced Methodology & Data Science Group. He is an experienced researcher in statistical machine learning methods tailored to healthcare analytics.
Alumni
If you’d like to contact anyone below, just let me know and I’ll do my best to put you in touch.
Completed PhDs
| Who? | Year | PhD | Where are they now? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tudor Morar | 2021 | Bayesian Optimisation over Mixed Parameter Spaces | Data Scientist, Dublin. |
| Kostas Papangelou | 2020 | Assessing Treatment Effect Heterogeneity: Predictive Covariate Selection and Subgroup Identification | Data Scientist, ASML, Netherlands |
| Georgiana Neculae | 2020 | Ensemble Learning with Spiking Neural Networks | Research Scientist, BenevolentAI, London |
| Henry Reeve | 2018 | Learning in High Dimensions with Asymmetric Costs Winner, UoM CS Best Thesis award. | Lecturer, University of Bristol |
| Sarah Nogueira | 2017 | Quantifying the Stability of Feature Selection Winner, UoM CS Best Thesis award. | Staff ML Engineer Lead, Criteo, Paris |
| Nikos Nikolaou | 2016 | Cost-sensitive Boosting: A Unified Approach Winner, UoM CS Best Thesis award. | Lecturer, University College London |
| Kostas Sechidis | 2015 | Hypothesis Testing and Feature Selection in Semi-Supervised Data Winner, UoM CS Best Thesis award. | Principal Data Scientist, Novartis, Switzerland |
| Richard Stapenhurst | 2012 | Diversity, Margins, and Non-Stationary Learning | Senior Software Engineer, Google, London |
| Adam Pocock | 2012 | Feature Selection via Joint Likelihood Winner, UoM CS Best Thesis award. British Computer Society Distinguished Dissertation 2013. Read the press release here. | Principal Researcher, Oracle Labs, Boston |
| Manuela Zanda | 2010 | A Probabilistic Perspective on Ensemble Diversity | Data Scientist, Arm Ltd. |
| Amir Ahmad | 2009 | Data Transformation for Decision Tree Ensembles | Associate Professor, United Arab Emirates University |
Awards/prizes
| Who? | Prize |
|---|---|
| Henry Reeve | ESANN Best Student Paper Award 2017 |
| Nikos Nikolaou | ACM Best of Computing, Notable Article of 2016 |
| Nikos Nikolaou | AERFAI Summer School 2015 Best Poster Award |
| Kostas Sechidis | ECML Best Student Paper award 2014 |
| Adam Pocock | BCS Distinguished Dissertation Award 2013 |
| Gavin Brown | BCS Distinguished Dissertation Award 2004 |
Former Research Staff
| Who? | When? | Role | Where are they now? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kostas Sechidis | 2015-2018 | AstraZeneca Fellowship | Principal Data Scientist, Novartis, Switzerland |
| Nikos Nikolaou | 2016-2018 | EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow | Lecturer, University College London |
| Andrew Webb | 2017-2019 | EPSRC LAMBDA project | ML Engineer, vTime Ltd |
| Emily Turner | 2017-2019 | ESRC Domestic Abuse project | Data Scientist, Manchester |
| Tameem Adel | 2016-2017 | EPSRC LAMBDA project | Assistant Professor, Netherlands |
| Ming-Jie Zhao | 2008-2013 | EPSRC ADEPT project | Microsoft Research Asia |
| Nara Edakunni | 2010-2011 | EPSRC ADEPT project | Director, American Express, India |
| Peter Sutton | 2010-2011 | EPSRC REUNITE KTP | Director, Foxdog Studios Software. |
| Lloyd Henning | 2010-2011 | EPSRC REUNITE KTP | Director, Foxdog Studios Software. |
| Arjun Chandra | 2008-2009 | EPSRC ADEPT project | Research Scientist, GraphCore AI |
| Jeremy Singer | 2008-2011 | EPSRC iTLS project | Senior Lecturer, University of Glasgow |