Meet Joe - Our Machine Learning Tech Lead / Instructor
Joe is our resident data scientist, machine learning and artificial intelligence guru. His endless curiosity has seen him reach PhD level in his studies, search for new exoplanets in our galaxy, build machine learning models that can recognise objects, as well as develop his personal passions around photography, art and music.
With many years experience in the education sector, Joe is a superb mentor to our learners. He is passionate about teaching and was nominated for best lecturer of the year while working as a lecturer and mentoring junior data scientists at university.
He has lived and worked in both Hong Kong and New Zealand, and is fluent in Python, C, C++ and Java.
Before joining Developers Institute
Joe’s own studies have seen him accomplish a Bachelor’s degree with Honours in Computer Science and a Master’s in Computer Networks from the University of Auckland, followed by a PhD in Computer Science applied to Astronomy from Massey University.
As part of his PhD and postdoctoral research fellowship, Joe was part of a research project collecting data from telescopes around the world, including Mt John Observatory. The Lake Tekapo facility boasts an MOA 1.8-metre telescope - the largest in New Zealand - which is dedicated to the search for exoplanets. Using a technique called Gravitational Microlensing based on Albert Einstein’s General Relativity Theory, Joe’s team were able to discover several new exoplanets in our galaxy.
Joe also worked as a Senior Data Scientist, where he used machine learning to solve challenging real world problems on a large scale. He built machine learning models to make predictions based on event data, analysed large volumes of online data using Natural Language Processing techniques, and trained object recognition models to recognise objects.
I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
There’s more to Joe than data science…
While Joe is always happy to chat about AI, machine learning and data science, he’s also more than happy to talk photography, art or music - especially if it’s classical or jazz - which he enjoys playing on the piano and saxophone. Otherwise he loves to discuss big questions like how we can help humanity move forward and overcome challenges.
You might not expect it, but Joe used to work as a professional photographer, which he says allowed him to capture the world with his own unique vision. His friend once called him an ‘Artistic Geek’ which we think suits him pretty well. These days he still loves to take photos, but more often than not it’s photos of his kids. “Zillions of them”, to be precise!
