Hello

Hi, I’m Bryan Feeney. I’m an Irish computer programmer, based in Edinburgh, who’s gradually slid into the field of machine learning, where I’m currently finishing a PhD at UCL. My research interests have been focused on machine-learning with text, notably topic-modelling, but also sentiment analysis and other forms of classification. My PhD specifically has looked into correlated topic-modelling, multi-view topic-modelling and recommender systems, and topic-modelling of “micro-documents” such as tweets.

Prior to starting my PhD I worked in a few machine-learning/data-science jobs, involving online classification of websites; bandit-based online recommendation systems; offline recommendation systems using Hadoop; and probabilistic fuzzy record-matching (e.g. working around typos in names and addresses).

These days, working on my PhD, I generally use Java & Lucene for processing text, then R and Python for analysing it. Outside of research, I’ve been playing around with Haskell, precisely because it’s so very different to my “day-job”, and Rust, because, frankly, it seems like a more practical ML derivative than Haskell.

At the top you’ll see linked to my LinkedIn page, mostly dormant Twitter account, and the usual social bits and bobs, so feel free to get in touch.

While I was a web-designer myself in a previous life, doing the usual terrible things with PHP (and even Perl) and MySQL, I should credit the design of this website with Ruud van Asseldonk, whose former site-design I copied with only a few modifications.