Moray Allan

moray@sermisy.org

Career history

October 2010-	INA Consulting
	Work has included: Contributed to writing client responses to government consultation documents, after researching relevant topics. Assessed published consultation outcomes against client's own submissions. Carried out research on various strategic issues in banking, and contributed to writing papers on them, for a client considering an acquisition. Wrote research notes relating to risk management, stress testing and governance in banking, including technical issues of statistical modelling such as the Gaussian copula model, heavy tails and extreme events, and being Bayesian. Research work with Cass Business School: Participated in research on social investment, particularly Programme Related Investment by charities. Participated in research for Lord Mayor’s Initiative, ‘Restoring Trust in the City’.
June 2012-	Teclo Networks
	Ran trials of Teclo Sambal network optimisation with mobile telephone operators, including in Indonesia, Romania and Kuwait. Contributed to software development, including Erlang programming.
2003-	Debian (voluntary work)
	Debian conference: Conference Chair, leading the organising committee for DebConf, the annual international conference of the Debian project. Last conference July 2012 in Managua, Nicaragua. Local organiser for DebConf 2007 in Edinburgh, the largest to date, with 400 attendees from more than 40 countries. Team raised sponsorship from 30 companies to make the conference free to attend, and to cover attendee travel expenses. Debian development: Maintain a large number of packages, mostly associated with low-resource devices such as mobile phones. Formal member of Debian (Debian Developer) since 2004. Debian press team: Assist in preparation of press releases and other announcements, and in dealing with inquiries to the press team.
2010-	Université de Caen Basse Normandie
	Carried out research on machine learning, focusing on new models to improve web image search. Attended project review meetings with industrial partner. Presented research outcomes and supported in implementation. Helped advise PhD students on their research projects. Planned and supervised intern research project.
2007-2009	Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (=French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Automation)
	Post-doctoral research on machine learning and data mining within the Learning and Recognition in Vision (LEAR) group at INRIA. with a focus on automatic learning of object appearances using web images’ tags as noisy annotations. Outstanding Reviewer Award from Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference.
2004-2006	University of Edinburgh
	Carried out research on machine learning in the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation. Research featured on BBC Radio 4. Selected for oral presentations at British Machine Vision Conference and Neural Information Processing Systems conference. Teaching Assistant for the Data Mining and Exploration course; gave tutorials to MSc students on the Learning from Data course.
2002-2003	University of Cambridge
	Gave Prolog programming language tutorials to undergraduate Computer Science students.

Research publications

Yu Su, Moray Allan and Frédéric Jurie. Improving object classification using semantic attributes. Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference, 2010.

Josip Krapac, Moray Allan, Jakob Verbeek and Frédéric Jurie. Improving web image search results using query-relative classifiers. Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2010.

Moray Allan and Jakob Verbeek. Ranking user-annotated images for multiple query terms. Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference, 2009.

Moray Allan and Christopher K. I. Williams. Object Localization using the Generative Template of Features. Computer Vision and Image Understanding 113(7), 2009.

Moray Allan. Sprite Learning and Object Category Recognition using Invariant Features. PhD thesis, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 2007.

Christopher K. I. Williams and Moray Allan. On a Connection between Object Localization with a Generative Template of Features and Pose-space Prediction Methods. Informatics Research Report EDI-INF-RR-0719, University of Edinburgh, January 2006.

Moray Allan, Michalis K. Titsias and Christopher K. I. Williams. Fast Learning of Sprites using Invariant Features. Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference, 2005.

Moray Allan and Christopher K. I. Williams. Harmonising Chorales by Probabilistic Inference. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17, 2005.

Moray Allan. Harmonising chorales in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. MSc thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2002.

Research publications available online at http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~moray/

Education

2003-2007	Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, University of Edinburgh
	PhD in Machine Learning
2002-2003	Judge Business School, University of Cambridge
	Diploma in Management Studies
2001-2002	School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
	MSc in Informatics, with Distinction
1998-2001	Jesus College, University of Cambridge
	MA in Theology and Religious Studies (2.1) College award for performance in exams
1993-1998	Winchester College
	Five year academic scholarship A grades in A-level Maths (grade 1 in S Maths), Further Maths, Latin, Greek, AO-level French

Modern languages

English	Native speaker
French	Fluent
Spanish	High reading level, intermediate spoken
Persian	Beginner's reading level

Technical experience

• Machine learning: supervised and unsupervised learning; generative and discriminative probabilistic models, optimisation, Monte Carlo methods, graphical models, Bayesian modelling; classification, regression, time series modelling; kernel methods, Gaussian processes, support vector machines
• Programming: 20 years' experience; have worked on open source software using a variety of languages; most recent large projects used C, Perl, MATLAB
• Analysis: spreadsheets, databases, data-mining techniques
• Internet: website design, Apache, CGI, networking
• System administration: ran servers providing web server, version control repository (SVN, CVS), file server (NFS, NIS, Samba, FTP), mail server (IMAP, SMTP), UNIX shell facilities

Interests

• Travel: I enjoy travelling with others or alone, and have visited more than 50 countries, in North and South America, Europe, North Africa and Asia. Destinations in recent years included several countries in Southeastern Europe, Turkey, Lebanon and Uzbekistan.
• Music: I have a strong interest in classical music, and especially in the development of Western European choral music from Dufay to Monteverdi.
• History: I have a particular interest in the history of religion in the eastern Mediterranean region during the later Roman Empire.