Profile

My name is Rob!

I grew up in Warrington, in north-west England. But I’ve mostly lived in London since I turned 18. I now live in Walthamstow, and take the tube every day to work near Kings Cross.

I have zero pets, though I’d be happier with a non-zero number of cats. To make up for that, I’ve got an uncountable number of houseplants!

I’m pretty good at art. In fact I considered doing art at university. Instead I’m trying to just regularly go to drawing classes.

Otherwise I enjoy reading (pretty much anything, though often science fiction) and playing video games (PS4 and Switch).

I use statistics to help decide what is a priority for my company. These are often in the form of percentages or proportions. For example, I could run an experiment to get data which will let me find out if people are more likely to buy onion seeds (5%) or tomato seeds (30%). In this case I would recommend we sold only tomato seeds.

I’m often interested in how these numbers change over time.

I’ve also written computer programs that use probabilities to understand what language someone is speaking. For example, it could understand whether you are speaking Swahili or English. However, the program can’t understand language in the same way as a human!

I’m very lucky as I sometimes get to travel to East Africa. So far I’ve been to Kenya and Uganda. Hopefully I’ll get to visit Tanzania soon too. I visit to see my colleagues in Nairobi and Kampala, and to meet the farmers we support in the more rural areas of the countries.

However, I am based in our London office most of the time!

I get the tube (the Victoria line) to work. I get a coffee either on my way or first thing. I’m normally in by 9.30am.

My day is a mixture of meetings and focused work.

In the meetings I often talk to colleagues in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania via video calls.

By focused work I mean anything and everything. While this tends to include making numbers and data, I’ve also spent time doing graphic design!

I’ll tend to finish work by 6pm. Commute home. Then dinner, Netflix, and sleep!