Michael Ball

Experience

• 

  Crimson Education

  Mar 2015 - May 2017

  Academic Consultant

  Provide academic and vocational consultation to clients striving for admission to the world's top universities.

• 

  Lotto New Zealand

  Apr 2016 - Jun 2016

  Technical Support Representative

  • Listened to, analysed and resolved technical issues for customers and clients, including payment processing and Eftpos support, website issues, and contractor demands. • Documented processes and relationships in Microsoft CRM.

• 

  David Bozin, LP

  Jun 2016 - Jun 2017

  Business Dev and Sales Intern

  • Worked with companies like Roomdots, Sodio, Mixmax, & Fashiontap • Business dev activities including market and competitor research, lead compilation, outreach and inbound management.• Investor/ partnership deck creation & campaign design• Financial modelling• Startup hustle

• 

  Brown Space Engineering Student Group

  Jan 2017 - Oct 2017

  Software Developer

  • Sending a CubeSAT satellite to the International Space Station. Working on the conversion of sensor-data to usable products, database management and the satellite website. • Full-stack Javascript

• 

  Ambit

  Jun 2018 - Jul 2019

  Machine Learning Researcher

  - Implemented a SOTA natural language understanding platform (intent-classification, entity extraction, parsing, & state tracking)- Initiated and oversaw the transition from classical NLP to fine-tuned recurrent neural networks throughout Ambit's product- Built a multi-stage preprocessing pipeline into existing product architecture; decreased preprocessing error rate by 24%- Led research into multi-task, continual learning; enabled us to reuse core feature extraction model for multiple downstream tasks Show less

• 

  Nextspace

  Jun 2018 - May 2019

  Software Engineer

  - Co-led the team developing a centralised Django backend for low-latency aggregation of messy, large-scale data sources- Built a network of Django microservices connecting our central server to government infrastructure data sources throughout NZ.- Built an interactive 3D mapping \& visualisation platform for the management of Auckland City Council public health infrastructure.

• 

  Oculid

  Sept 2019 - Jul 2021

  I managed all of Oculid's production infrastructure, machine learning engineering, and software (excl. mobile). Some of the things I've done so far are:- Designed, implemented, and maintained all production infrastructure (AWS, Terraform, Docker, Sentry, Gitlab CI, etc.)- Led the company's transition from notebook hacking to serving models in production: data versioning w. DVC, experiment tracking & CI/CD w. MLFlow, and continuous testing and monitoring of production models with custom tools- Built a standalone data pipeline for automated data collection (enabling Oculid to collect the largest gaze prediction dataset in the world)- Designed and implemented GDPR processes in line with industry best practices.- Guided software engineering team growth: defined roles, interviewed candidates, distributed tasks, and provided mentorship Show less - Built the repository used by entire data science team for preprocessing, training, fine-tuning, & evaluation of all models.- Achieved 8x speedup in serving predictions through optimisation of model server & refactoring of data preprocessing pipeline- Built a GPU scheduling & prioritisation service to optimise data science job management across our in-house hardware stack.- Redesigned our image feature extractor using a variety of recent CNN innovations; decreased model error by 9%.- Oversaw three month research project into edge computing, TFLite, & serving optimized models on mobile devices. Show less

  • Engineering Lead

    Sept 2020 - Jul 2021

  • Machine Learning Engineer

    Sept 2019 - Aug 2020
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  Vara

  Aug 2021 - now

  Machine Learning Engineer