📧 thecharlieblake [at] gmail.com | 📌 Bristol
📚 Experience
Research Engineer
Graphcore
🗓️ Aug 2021 - Present
- Researcher in the language team
Software Engineer
Expedia Inc.
🗓️ Sept 2018 - Aug 2019
- On team of 3 developers building new Intelligent Pricing Service
- Built infrastructure to send data to/from production ML models
- Worked with data science team to identify features & data sources
Research Assistant
St Andrews Computer Science Department
🗓️ June - Aug 2018
- Developed BSc thesis into open-source project & paper (Solvitaire)
Software Engineer Intern (Consecutive Summers)
Expedia Inc.
🗓️ June - Aug 2016 | 🗓️ June - Aug 2017
E-commerce Manager
Bullboat UK
🗓️ Nov 2014 - Feb 2015
📁 Projects
❄️ Snowflake: GNNs for locomotion control
🗓️ Oct 2020 - Feb 2021
- Paper submitted to NeurIPS 2021, based on MSc thesis (1st author)
- Used graph neural networks to control simulated robotic agents
- Discovered a new technique to scale control to more complex agents, using parameter freezing during training
- Implemented range of GNN and RL algorithms
♣️ Solvitaire: A solver for Solitaire card games
- Paper based on BSc thesis, aim to publish this year
- Uses AI search techniques to prove if starting deals are solvable
- Discovered win rates for many popular games that were previously unknown
- Article in the New Scientist, Nov 2019 detailing our results
🧠 (Expedia) Intelligent Pricing Service
- Back-end service for optimised real-time pricing decisions
👨🎓 Education
MSc Computer Science
University of Oxford
🗓️ Sept 2019 - Sept 2020
Distinction | Focus on ML modules
BSc Computer Science
University of St Andrews
🗓️ Sept 2015 - June 2018
First class degree | Firsts in all modules
Bancroft's School
A* grades in all 4 A-levels & 10 GCSEs
🎖️ Awards
Oxford | Archibald Jackson Prize
St Andrews | Principal's Scholarship ∙ Second Year CS Prize ∙ Christopher Strachey Prize ∙ Undergraduate Awards: Commended Entrant ∙ Miller Award: Runner Up ∙ Dean's List x3
School | Amnesty International Young Human Rights Reporter: Runner Up & Judge x2 ∙ Arkwright Scholarship ∙ Draper's Medal ∙ Sixth-Form Scholarship
🧩 Interests
🎭 Improvised Comedy
🎞️ Cinema