PhD Alumni Spotlight

Antonios Katsarakis (PhD 2016–2021) reimagined data replication with invalidation‑based protocols for ultra‑fast, strongly consistent distributed datastores—earning the EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award Honorable Mention. He’s now a Principal Researcher at Huawei, designing next‑generation databases.

Cigdem Beyan (PhD 2011–2015) developed computer vision and machine learning methods to detect unusual fish behaviors in underwater videos, tackling challenges like imbalanced data and large-scale monitoring. She is now an Associate Professor and co-leads the VISP group at the University of Verona.

Ebtehal Turki S. Alotaibi (PhD 2020–2025) advanced Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for autonomous systems, creating adaptable decision-making frameworks for real-world robotics. She is now CEO and CTO of Pixconvey, developing autonomous mobility and delivery platforms in the UK and Saudi Arabia.

Iain Wallace (PhD 2006–2010) researched social reasoning in multi-agent systems, exploring how intelligent agents model and reason about interactions. He is now Technical Director at Faculty, leading teams that deliver cutting-edge AI systems for industry and government.

Jiangming Liu (PhD 2017–2021) researched natural language understanding and generation under discourse representation theory, developing multilingual systems for formal machine-interpretable representations. He is now an Associate Professor advancing AI and language technologies.

Marcio Fonseca (PhD 2020–2024) researched summarisation techniques for long documents, exploring how large language models can generate context-tailored summaries. He is now a Machine Learning Engineer at the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, designing AI solutions for the legislative domain.

Marco Damonte (PhD 2015–2019) researched Natural Language Understanding, advancing methods for interpreting and processing human language. He is now a Machine Learning Scientist at JetBrains, working on AI-powered coding agents.

Michael Stam (PhD 2019–2024) developed AI-driven tools for protein design, creating software and machine learning methods to make biomedical innovation more reliable and accessible. He now leads AI and bioinformatics at Biophoundry, tackling global challenges in antimicrobial resistance.

Nikos Papasarantopoulos (PhD 2016–2019) developed machine learning techniques to represent data from multiple views and modalities, with applications in Natural Language Processing. He is now a Senior Machine Learning Engineer in a Clinical Research Organisation.

Phoenix Huang (PhD 2011–2014) researched multiclass object classification and hierarchical recognition systems, advancing computer vision techniques for large-scale underwater video analysis. He is now an AI Architect, designing enterprise-scale AI systems.

Rohan Gorantla (PhD 2021–2024) developed AI models to predict drug-protein binding strength, enabling large-scale computational screening for drug discovery. He now works at Novartis, applying machine learning to accelerate early-stage drug development.

William Hugh Burrough Smith (PhD 2017–2022) trained robots to navigate autonomously using machine learning, developing methods to recognize places under changing conditions and detect scenes of interest. He is now a Machine Learning Research Engineer, creating advanced AI solutions for real-world applications.