Hello โœŒ๏ธ

I’m Head of Data at Carbonfact, where we measure the carbon footprint of clothing items ๐Ÿƒ. Before that I worked for Alan, a health insurance company. My PhD topic was about applying machine learning – Bayesian networks in particular ๐Ÿ•ธ๏ธ – to query optimisation in relational databases ๐Ÿค–. My current areas of interest revolve around online machine learning ๐Ÿฅ, document processing ๐Ÿ”ฌ, as well as tooling and good practices for data analytics ๐Ÿ“Š and engineering ๐Ÿ“ฆ

I’m half British ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง and half Belgian ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ‡ช. I went to university in Toulouse, France ๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท. My academic ๐ŸŽ“ background is a mix of math ๐Ÿงฎ, economics ๐Ÿ’ธ, and computer science ๐Ÿ–ฅ๏ธ. I got hooked into data science in 2014 after watching Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill nerding it out in Moneyball โšพ

I enjoy programming and maintaining open-source projects. In particular, I co-created River ๐ŸŒŠ, an online machine learning library written in Python ๐Ÿ. I’m a Kaggle competitions Master ๐Ÿ† and take an interest in competitive data science. I also get a kick out of writing blog posts and occasionally giving talks ๐Ÿค“

Besides work, I like to spend time reading ๐Ÿ“š, watching movies ๐Ÿฟ, cycle touring ๐Ÿšฒ, juggling ๐Ÿคน, playing frisbee ๐Ÿฅ, looking at – and sometimes making – modern art, and cooking ๐Ÿฒ – my signature dish is lasagna ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡น. My favorite snack is a peanut butter ๐Ÿฅœ and banana ๐ŸŒ sandwich and my go-to beer is Guinness โ˜˜๏ธ. I have a brother who’s into theoretical physics and low-level software engineering ๐Ÿ˜ตโ€๐Ÿ’ซ

Feel free to send me an email at maxhalford25@gmail.com if you want to get in touch ๐Ÿค