Ian Grimstead

Senior Data Scientist

Ian is a Senior Data Scientist who joined the ONS in May 2018. He is an old school programmer who… had his first game published whilst still at school in 1984. Since then he studied computer science at Cardiff University, gaining a PhD in Computer Aided Design. Ian has over 15 years industrial experience, ranging from embedded development for early general-purpose graphics cards, 3D engines for games consoles, haptics for gynaecological training and five years developing robot-assisted stereotactic neurosurgery planning software.

Between his various roles in industry, Ian worked for 10 years as a senior research fellow at Cardiff University, lecturing ubiquitous computing and researching distributed rendering, haptic input devices and 3D display technologies. Alongside this he also collaborated with other cross-disciplinary projects such as mentoring users of a several thousand core compute cluster.

Ian enjoys the challenge of applying computer science to real-world problems across disciplines whilst using common, off-the shelf hardware; or more colloquially, squeezing a quart into (or out of) a pint pot. He is currently interested in convolutional neural networks and natural language processing.

Posts by Ian Grimstead

Technical Report: Project Mertz—novel use of historical RAF flight safety records

Part of our mission at the Data Science Campus (DSC) is to build data science capability across the public sector. In this project, which grew out of our Data Science Accelerator programme, we worked with the Royal Air Force (RAF) to help upskill their staff in the Python programming language and natural language processing (NLP) methods.

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