👋 I’m Timothy and I live in sunny Singapore with my wife and three cats.

Here, I write about Machine Learning and broader computing topics, sharing what I learn, build and experiment with along the way.

You can find me on GitHub, Hacker News and LinkedIn.

Skills

Diffusion Models

Large Language Models

Pandas

Python

PyTorch

Scikit-learn

Experience

  1. 2018
    Neural Swarm, Hong Kong
    Co-Founder

    I lead a team at Neural Swarm, an AI consultancy that helps startups train models and build AI products.

    Recent projects include:

    • LLM Agent Benchmarking: using Google Python ADK to evaluate SOTA LLM agent scaffolds across coding (SWE-Bench Verified), computer use (WebArena) and general assistant (GAIA) benchmarks.
    • Textbook Question Answering: RAG-based tutor from textbook PDFs; post-trained using SFT on QA pairs and GRPO on user feedback to improve accuracy and formatting. Built with Next.js using React.
    • Personalised Headshot Generation: Stable Diffusion XL, fine-tuned with per-user LoRA models. User photos validated with image quality assessment workflow and ControlNet used to guide pose generation.
  2. 2016
    Discovery List, Hong Kong
    Senior Machine Learning Engineer

    Product discovery website backed by a cluster of AWS EC2 instances running web scrapers and custom Named Entity Recognisers. Used to identify and link 10,000+ products from news sources into a graph.

  3. 2013
    QuoteRed, London
    Technical Co-Founder

    Note-taking application incubated through Entrepreneur First, a startup scheme for UK’s brightest graduates. Built the Ruby-on-Rails back-end, jQuery bookmarklet and PostgreSQL comment system.

Education

  1. 2008
    Imperial College London
    PhD Computer Science

    Thesis on “Internet Auction Processes and Mechanisms”. Served as a Teaching Assistant for two undergraduate subjects: Probability & Stochastic Processes and Traffic Theory & Queueing Systems.

  2. 2005
    University College London (UCL)
    BSc (Hons.) Computer Science

    Awarded first class honours, completing a dissertation on “Query by Humming”, a group project on “Temperature Mapping of the Lunar Surface” and electives in Algorithms, Databases, Logic and Probability.

Achievements

  • Kaggle Big Data Derby Analytics Competition (3rd place prize of US$10,000)
  • Imperial College Facebook Hackathon (1st place prize of ÂŁ500)
  • Organised a r/MachineLearning meetup at NeurIPS