Thomas Foster
Building and exploring deep learningLondon, UK
About
Hey! I'm Thom. I'm not quite sure what to call myself - not so long ago I was a student, and up until recently I was an entrepreuner. More on that below.
Since late 2022, I've been increasingly focused on research, and am currently excitedly exploring opportunities in academia and industry. I'm particularly interested in how we can automate the evaluation and training of deep neural nets.
This means I'm interested in how we evaluate models on complex criteria (such as with learned reward functions), how we can systematically generate examples the model finds challenging (as in curriculum/active/adversarial learning) and how we can turn this into a useful training paradigm (such as RLHF or open ended RL). If this interests you, you can read more about my research interests.
Outside of work I love running, the outdoors and tinkering with fun projects. Like any self-important programmer I have a blog. If any of the above interests you, get in touch!
Timeline
Genei.io
Founder and Chief Science OfficerUsing large language models to speed up research. Think ChatGPT but scoped to documents you upload. We went through YC combinator in 2021 and recieved funding from some great people. If you're passionate about applying all the recent advances of generative AI, we're hiring
Halo
Founder and Chief Technology OfficerDuring the pandemic I was growing increasingly frustrated at the low-tech, cumbersome procedure to get COVID-19 tests. I decided to help, and founded Halo, a biotechnology company, with a friend from university. Through integrating an easy to use app with proprietary in lab sample tracking software, we scaled to over 1000 tests per day and had a meaningful impact on Britains pandemic response.
University of Oxford
Master's in Computer ScienceGraduated 2nd in cohort and won the Microsoft prize for best undergraduate dissertation, which you can read here.