Simon has been building and running ML projects since 1994 (when he started his Ph.D. in MachineLearning). His first commercial project was for the Royal Navy, and since then he has worked in Telecom, Defense, Consultancy, Manufacturing, and Finance. This means Simon has experienced a wide range of working environments and different types of projects. As well as working in a variety of commercial environments Simon collaborated on EU research projects, UK Government funded research projects and worked as an industrial rep on three MIT consortia (BigData@CSAIL, Systems That Learn, and the CISR Data Research Board).
Simon was also an industrial fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for a year. This means that he has also seen a lot of the communities' practices and concerns as they developed, and he had the chance to put them into use in a commercial environment.
Right now, Simon is working for a technology consultancy called GFT, and his job there is primarily to deliver ML projects for companies in the capital markets such as investment banks, although we also do work in retail banking, insurance, and manufacturing.