A Little Bit About Me

Hi! My name's Jack. I'm currently working as a Graduate Controls Software Engineer, working on a project called IBEX at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source.

Since completing a year long placement at the STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source as part of my Computer Science BSc, my passion for science has skyrocketed, changing my entire outlook on the type of software development I decided to pursue.

STEM

A topic I am becoming increasingly interested in is public engagement. Whenever possible, I take pride in participating in STEM outreach events to share my enthusiasm with the general public, hopefully even inspiring the next generation to work in this amazing field!
I am currently trying to adapt one of my projects which you can see below into a STEM activity which I hope to present at schools.

Hobbies

I strongly believe in maintaining a healthy work life balance. In order to do this, I fill my week with a number of hobbies.
Not only do I listen to rock, I also climb them and go under them!

Rock Climbing

One of my most beloved hobbies is rock climbing, this is something I enjoy doing both with and without friends. I believe part of the reason behind why I enjoy rock climbing is because not only is it beneficial to my fitness, but also my brain.
In order to climb efficiently, I need to first find the best route from the bottom to the top. When doing this, I must take into consideration the following points:

  • My climbing style
  • Build
  • Body weight distribution

While on placement, I convinced a number of colleagues to go climbing regularly with me
You can see some of my successful and unsuccessful climbs here

Caving

Though not as often as climbing up them, I also enjoy going under rocks after a friend introduced me to the sport of caving, also known as potholing. I would like to continue caving when any and all opportunities arise.

Rock Music

When I'm not climbing rocks or venturing underneath them, I am listening to them.
A long, long, long time ago, back to a time when the word Covid19 was unheard of, I often went to live concerts and music festivals such as Slam Dunk and Download.
My favourite genres are classic rock, punk rock, pop punk and grunge.

Image Processing in Neutron Tomography Beyond The Standard Geometry

My final year dissertation is a collaboration with UKRI - STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source to improve data collection and image processing for neutron tomography instruments.

This project is being developed primarily for IMAT, a scientific instrument within ISIS, but could be utilised by other instruments within ISIS later on. My work will eventually make its way into The Mantid Project within the Mantid Imaging repository.

tomography imaging
tomography imaging
tomography imaging

Autoreduction

I have spent just over a year on placement between 2019-2020 primarily working on an open source project called Autoreduction as part of the UK Research and Innovations, Science and Technology Facilities Councils ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

The primary task carried out by the Autoreduction project is to gather data from the ISIS datastore via polling, and then use Mantid and user scripts to reduce data and store in a Ceph storage cluster. The secondary purpose is basic visualisation for on the fly analysis.

Drones, Object Detection and Training and Testing Data Pipeline

This is a project I have been actively working on in my spare time after first developing a basic prototype which can be seen below at Coventry University. (Sorry for the straight face, I only used a frontal face classification for my first test so I needed to hold a constant facial expression)

The example below uses the DJI Tello drone as a platform and a tuned Haar Cascade classifier trained with custom data collected, cleaned and separated into test and training sets as part of a data collection and cleaning pipeline I constructed.

I have since moved to a more practical platform using the Crazyflie drone which has more capable hardware for use with the YOLO V4 classifier.

This project focuses on creating a swarm of drones to autonomously navigate a building, identifying objects of interest and pinning there locations to a 3D blueprint constructed by the drones when navigating the building to a dashboard.

The swarm of drones act as their own mesh network to relay information to each other extending their range of flight exponentially.

I do not have a clear goal in mind for this project other than to simply have fun!

I will make the GitHub repository including the automated data collection and cleaning pipeline for training my classifiers public on completion of the project (I estimate this will be sometime mid 2021 with my new found free time as a result of lockdown)

I hope to use this project as part of my STEM outreach to introduce the next generation to all the cool things programming allows you to do!

Predicting Pulsars

This project had two main purposes for me:

  1. To fulfill my love for the stars
  2. To compare and contrast a variety of machine learning techniques

911 Calls Capstone Projects

Working on the 911 Calls Capstone dataset has helped me learn better generic data analysis techniques and more importantly how to approach data.

I have learned that gaining an understanding of the data I am working with greatly improves my ability to apply the right analytical tools to generate constructive insights.