Hi, my name is Gautier Dagan, I am a third year PhD student in NLP at the University of Edinburgh 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 through the UKRI CDT programme.

I am exploring the intersection of Multimodal Learning, Interactive Learning and Representation learning. My research focuses on combining neuro-symbolic methods in agents to generate coherent plans or generalise to new capabilities. I am also interested in code generation and the applications of NLP to software engineering and automation.

Education

I started my PhD at the University of Edinburgh (September 2021) under the supervision of Alex Lascarides and Frank Keller.

Previously, I graduated Cum Laude from the University of Amsterdam with a MSc. in Artificial Intelligence in 2019, where I focused on Language Emergence in Cultural Evolution. At the Institute for Language, Logic and Computation, I was part of the i-machine-think research group working under the supervision of Dr. Elia Bruni.

Before that, I obtained my B.A. from Northwestern University in June 2017 pursuing three majors: Computer Science, Economics, and International Studies.

Experience

From August to November 2023, I completed a research internship at Meta in Paris, within the CodeGen team. I focused on improving tokenizers for code generation tasks and published a paper at ICML 2024 as a result of my work.

In the two years between my Msc. and the PhD, I was a Machine Learning Engineer 🤖 at Mansa, and then at Research Grid in London. While working there, I obtained Solutions Architect and Machine Learning AWS certifications and got hands on experience at managing live production environments using best practices. Working in the industry also gave me the confidence to build and ship ML features and products for a wide variety of applications, from finance to healthcare.

In my free time, I also participate in Kaggle competitions and I am currently ranked in the top 1% globally.

Entrepreneurship

In March 2016, I co-founded Zcruit, an emerging startup looking to bring predictive analytics to college football recruiting. We are a proud alumni of the Wildfire pre-accelerator program through the Garage at Northwestern University. I left the team to pursue my Master's degree after we were aquired by Reigning Champs in November 2017. Since then, both the team and the product have continued to grow and flourish. Read more about Zcruit in the USA Today article that put us on the map: here.

Since then, I have worked in multiple startups and even tried my hand (again) at founding one several times. I joined the Entrepreneur First LD 15 cohort between September 2020 and January 2021.

I am currently part of a VC firm called Creator Fund where I help source and evaluate deals in the AI and ML space.

I love entrepreneurship and startups and find a lot of joy in the similarities between the exploration of ideas in startups and academic research.

Skills

• Python
• Pytorch
• AWS (Solutions Architect and Machine Learning Certified)
• Javascript/NodeJS
• Git
• C++
• Rust
• ReactJS
• IoT: Raspberry Pi / Arduino
• Responsive Hybrid Apps
• SCRUM/AGILE