David Towers

I am a PhD Student Programmer from County Durham. I have achieved an MSc in Computer Games Engineering from Newcastle University, passing with Distinction, a BSc with First Class Honours in Computer Science also at Newcastle University, and I have PgDip in Cloud Computing for Big Data completed as part of the taught year of Newcastle University’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Cloud Computing for Big Data as a part of which I joined as a part of Cohort 7, I am now a year into my PhD, investigating Neural Architecture Search as a member of the Newcastle AI Lab.

Since starting university in 2016, my goal has been to become a lecturer. I originally intended to pursue this in the field of security, crafting my dissertation to be security based. When I asked the head of security what I should do next, they suggested something different as they would rather have a student with a broader base of subjects than a student that had only done security. I then joined the Games Lab for MSc, and during this period, I found my interests shifting towards Machine Learning and Data Science, partially influenced by my friend who did his Data Science MSc at the same time as my Games MSc. I joined the Big Data CDT to pursue this new interest. During the taught year, I became intersted in the automation of Machine Learning, so when we were given the list of PhD titles and I saw the option of NAS, I chose it as my first choice. This has led to my first paper, published at the NAS workshop at CVPR 2022.