mkross313

I held a temporary research position during the writing of my PhD thesis in which I contributed to a project investigating the use of graph neural networks for recommendation systems.

On two occasions during my PhD I was employed by the Heriot-Watt University sports union as the coordinator of the squash club. This was a management role involving the day-to-day running and upkeep of the club. It taught me a lot about leadership, delegation and organisation.

My PhD research investigated how, and to what extent, a humanoid robotic coach could motivate people to adhere to exercise in rehabilitation after stroke, and squash training. I used the Pepper robot as a platform for a system (coded in Python) that used real-world human coaching data to formalise and implement coaching policies that guided a user through an exercise session. These policies were personalised based on user type and further adapted to each individual over time using reinforcement learning. We conducted two in-person studies in squash (one short-term and one long-term) and one in stroke (short-term) and found that the system was able to engage participants in both domains, and had a positive impact on motivation and technical improvements in squash. Publications emerging from my PhD can be found on my Google Scholar profile: https://tinyurl.com/gspmkr).

I did a 6-month industrial placement with leonardo working as part of the model driven engineering, modularity & reuse team. My work focused on processor in the loop – running models of systems on target hardware – and how this process could be simplified. I created a program in MATLAB that automatically altered and configured a given simulink model for use on a chosen development board.

Each semester from the final year of my MEng to the final year of my PhD I was a lab assistant for various computer science modules that the university taught. This work included teaching, tutoring and lecturing on a variety of computer science related topics and was a valuable experience in improving my communication and teaching skills, as well as my technical knowledge.

In the summer of 2016, I worked on a project involving automating the discovery of hazard scenarios, and trying to predict when hazardous situations could occur in a system. I created uml and sysml diagrams for dummy systems and wrote a program to convert the diagrams into a promela model of a system.

At the end of 2016, I worked one day per week at sserc doing maintenance and improvements on their website. This gave me early experience of the standards expected in a real company as well as helping to consolidate my skills in web development.

I worked in MacDonald’s for a few periods between July 2012 and September 2015, in stores in Inverness and Edinburgh. This was a valuable experience for me as I developed and improved many skills whilst working at McDonalds such as communication and responsibility.