About Me

My background is in computing - writing reliable software for almost 25 years within: banking, insurance, retail and rail sectors. In that time I have worked independently and as an employee for: corporations, medium-sized companies, start-ups and not for profits.

Statistics became a professional interest of mine, many of the projects I have worked upon required significant data engineering. The ability to clean data, understand the generating processes (and anomalies they may introduce) then make hypotheses from exploratory data analysis led me to want to better understand statistics and machine learning.

Whilst (previously) working at OceanMind running the development team involved processing shipping radio and satellite data from all around the world and using machine learning (which a researcher developed) to create a system for identifying and classifying illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. This exposed me to the power of machine learning whilst also realising I needed to have a statistics background.

This interest led me to study statistics distance learning at the University of Sheffield, firstly a PG Cert, followed by a MSc.

This site will act to document my thoughts predominately on computing and statistics. Sharing what will hopefully be of wider interest to others. My statistics project entitled Classification of vessel types using deep learning from vessel trajectories was based upon IUU fishing and a number of areas for further investigation remain. Those require further work using mixture models, Kalman filters and deep learning; so one can expect posts on these matters as my analysis progresses.

I find writing a good way to organise my thoughts. I am dyslexic, so apologies in advance for the odd spelling or grammatical mistake - annoyingly what I see is not always what I write!