I am a Franco-(British)-American computer scientist, and serve as Director of Reseach at Google DeepMind, and as an Honorary Professor at UCL.
I previously was Head of Machine Learning at Cohere a research scientist at Cohere, before which I was at Research Scientist and RL Area Lead at Facebook AI Research, preceded by my time as a Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind, following a (short) period as the CTO of Dark Blue Labs, which I also co-founded.
Prior to my move to industry, I was working at the University of Oxford's Department of Computer Science, and was a Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, while also lecturing at Hertford College to students taking Oxford's new computer science and philosophy course.
Before coming to Oxford's DCS in 2008 to do the MSc which led to my DPhil, I did graduate work in the philosophy departments at the University of St Andrews in mathematical logic, the foundation of mathematics, and some philosophy of language. Prior to this, I obtained a BSc in Physics & Philosophy from the University of Sheffield. Before that, I grew up in France (Tours and Grenoble) and the US (Pittsburgh, PA).
My research draws on topics and methods from Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics (Natural Language Processing) and Quantum Information Theory (specifically the use of category theoretical frameworks). My main project presently involves developing, implementing and evaluating compositional vector-based models of natural language semantics. I am generally interested in theories of—and applications for—mathematical linguistics, natural language semantics, and empirical semantic knowledge discovery.