William Leeney

I’m passionate about AI, Open-Source Software, ~~Crypto~~, Yoga and Basketball.

AI Solutions Specialist I excel at solving novel problems with AI. I’m a PhD student of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology at the University of Bristol supervised by Dr. Ryan McConville. If you have any questions that I can help with, please feel free to reach out via email at will dot leeney at outlook dot com or on LinkedIn. If you want to take a look at my CV then Click here.

Supervision Throughout my academic journey, I have actively engaged in mentorship, guiding over 50 machine learning projects for final year undergraduates. I excel in helping students formulate research problems, design experiments, and effectively communicate their findings through written reports and presentations.

Thesis Unsupervised Graph Neural Networks: Training Strategies and Evaluation Principles.

I demonstrated the need of a framework for more reliable evaluations showing the importance of experimental conditions.
I proposed empirically quantifying the sensitivity of performance comparisons to randomness.
I showed that it is possible to train GNNs with modularity to bypass a supervised optimisation in model selection or hyperparameter tuning.
I extended the framework to a new scenario for community detection, showing that multiple clients can collaborate on learning.

Areas of Study

Unsupervised Learning
GNNs
Randomness in ML Benchmarking
Federated Learning
Community Detection

I’m interested in AI as I believe we can improve the lives of all humans through practical machine learning. It’s also pretty fun seeing sci-fi dreams come to life. The applications of my research can be to improve latent representations for enhancing search; to encode patient information for health care to predict drug treatment recommendation; to help detect fake news on social media networks; to find financial indicator signals for price prediction trading algorithms.

Software Skills

python
julia
typescript
latex
git
shell scripts
C
java
html
css