As a highly skilled and seasoned data scientist, Ben has helped deliver transformational projects through the application of machine learning in Python. With over 15 years of experience under his belt, he has worked at and with industry leaders and prestigious organizations like Smarkets, Myjar, Oleeo, and Loveholidays spanning various sectors such as finance, technology, e-commerce, and tourism.


Off-Duty, Ben delights in cultivating lifelong memories with his precocious 4-year-old son, who he's trying to guide making up his mind between professional careers as a bus driver and a machine learning engineer. He also hones his Choi Kwang Do skills, trying to strike a balance between flair and (lack of) grace.

About Ben

Ben's fascination with machine learning and computer science took root at a young age, fuelled further by the captivating Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match of 1997. This early passion paved the way for his career in data science, where he has become familiar with betting markets, credit scoring applications, and natural language processing. His skill set includes delivering machine learning and decision models for production systems, reinforced by his research in machine learning problems, brain modelling, and neuroscience lab experiments.

Ben boasts nearly two decades of experience across England, Japan, Germany, Sweden, and Spain. He has designed and conducted wet lab experiments on cell cultures, analysed experiments with terabytes of data, run brain models on IBM supercomputers with up to 64k cores, built production systems processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, and trained language models on a large corpus of text documents. Most recently, he was working as the head of data science at Loveholidays, the UK's third-biggest online travel agent, where he managed a team to work on marketing, a/b testing analysis, and recommendations. 

His academic accolades total numerous competitive scholarships and recognitions, including the Marie Curie ITN, DAAD - Germany, Socrates, Monbukagakusho, FI, and Europe's ECRO, and over 300 citations, highlighting his contributions to research fields such as statistical analyses, machine learning, and computational modelling. 

After completing his Ph.D. in computer science from one of Europe's premier engineering universities (KTH) he came to London, where he co-founded and served as president of Data Science Speakers, London. He further authored two celebrated textbooks – Machine Learning for Time-Series and Artificial Intelligence in Python Cookbook, both published by Packt Publishing.

A glance into Ben's background: 

• Over 15 years of experience in R&D and software development.

• Expert problem solver specializing in machine learning and decision engines for production within various industries. 

• Ph.D. in Computer Science from a premier European engineering university.

• Experience communicating at all levels, across departments and to clients; able to transfer knowledge and expertise to coworkers.

• Full–stack data science: production code in Python, Java, Kotlin, and C++. DevOps with various tools.

• Authored two textbooks on machine learning with Python.

Talks

Ben's GitHub repositories showcase a myriad of his projects and his contributions to other projects. A prominent example is brat, the rapid annotation tool.