Introductions
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Who I Am¶
An experienced technical consultant specialising in AI Solutions and Generative AI implementation, with an academic AI background. A Professional Member of the Institute of Analysts and Programmers holding an dual honours degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from the Russell Group University of Birmingham.
I help teams, companies, and organisations:
- Build AI prototypes and solutions
- Solve problems and automate workflows using AI
- Implement AI in a future-proof, provider agnostic manner
- Technical reviews and evaluation
- Advise on state-of-the-art AI tools and knowledge
I have carried out technical reviews of AI Book Publications for Springer Apress. Also, technical reviews of Edge AI University course material and lessons as part of a Global Education Project to help educate students in EdgeAI with Imagination Technologies, Madrid University and Peking University.
Two people I admire most in this field, Eric Ries and Jeremy Howard, have shared my writing. Eric described one piece as "one of my favorite writeups" on Hacker News, and Jeremy linked to my article as a testimonial from his fast.ai SolveIT homepage. I am proud of that and it means a lot to me.
Highlights¶
- Technical Reviewer for Springer/Apress "PyTorch Recipes" (2nd edition)
- Technical Reviewer for Imagination Technologies Global Edge AI curriculum (adopted by universities worldwide)
- Perceptual Latent Loss research (June 2023) - 18 months before Meta's similar approach in "Boosting Latent Diffusion with Perceptual Objectives"
- Computer Vision for Medical Diagnostics took a prototype edge based, bacterial detection system into a production ready product, resulting in commercial sales
- Topped Jeremy Howard's Fashion-MNIST leaderboard in every epoch category (5, 20, 50 epochs) with a non-pretrained model
Past projects¶
I have worked on commercial machine learning research with Imagination Technologies and on projects with end-clients such as General Motors, Jaguar Land Rover, HSBC, Atos Origin and the UK Government: Department for Education, Government Offices for the Regions, Food Standards Agency.
Services¶
I help teams, companies, and organisations:
- Commercial AI Research: Feasibility studies, SOTA evaluation, architecture design for specific constraints, proof-of-concept development
- RAG Systems: Hybrid vector/BM25 search, reranking, embedding model selection, text/tabular/image retrieval
- Agents and Automation: Multi-agent systems, LangGraph, LangChain, human-in-the-loop workflows
- LLM & VLM Implementation: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Llama, Qwen; fine-tuning, LoRA training, synthetic data generation
- Quality & Evaluation: Hallucination reduction, LLM-as-judge, confidence scoring, regression testing
- Computer Vision: Custom model architecture design, training, super resolution, edge deployment, INT8 quantisation
- Image Generation: Diffusion models, Stable Diffusion, Flux, LoRA training, generative image editing
- Prompt Engineering: Effective prompting for language and image models
Background¶
- AI degree from University of Birmingham (2000) with cited thesis on evolutionary image processing
- One of the first cohort of 1000 SolveIt students
- First neural network trained in 1999 on census data
- First NLP work using Prolog in 1998
Skills and technologies¶
- Prompt engineering for Language Models
- LLMs, SLMs, VLMs, RLMs
- RAG, advanced
- AI Tools: LangChain and LlamaIndex
- AI Agent frameworks: LangGraph, Smolagents, LlamaIndex Workflows
- PyTorch, Python, .Net, C#
- Quantisation of Edge AI models and testing models running on FPGA implementations of Neural Network Accelerators
- Synthetic data generation
Testimonials¶
"Chris joined Imagination to consult in the area of deep learning, specifically super-resolution. He arrived with comprehensive knowledge of existing networks and their capabilities... Chris was able to communicate effectively with research staff and navigate our engineering infrastructure to produce results quickly. I wouldn't hesitate to engage Chris again... He is professional, articulate and a pleasure to work with."
— Vice President, Compute Software (Technology Office), Imagination Technologies
"Chris is one of the most competent, most imaginative problem-solvers I've come across. He's unafraid to tackle difficult technical matters... He's obviously very intelligent and he keeps up-to-speed with latest technologies."
— Solution Architect, Global Technology Services Company
Production Impact¶
| Project | Result |
|---|---|
| Multi-locale Translation Pipeline | Days/weeks → hours/minutes across locales including Polish, Korean, Arabic |
| Conversational AI System | 76% answer rate across 6,400+ queries |
| RAG Content Generation | 10x content scaling (200 → 2,000+ Q&A pairs) |
| Edge AI Super Resolution | 30+ fps real-time performance on neural network accelerator hardware with integer quantisation |
Research Interests¶
Currently collaborating with the former Head of Breeding at Guide Dogs UK on AI-powered dog behaviour assessment and exploring robotic quadrupeds as assistive technology. I presented at the International Working Dog Conference 2025 on AI robotics solutions for working dogs.