About me
Experience & Education I am a final-year PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at EPFL and a research assistant at the Idiap Research Institute in the Natural Language Understanding group, supervised by James Henderson. My PhD research explores deep attention-based models and their connection to Bayesian nonparametrics in Natural Language Processing. I hold undergraduate (2018) and master’s (2020) degrees from the University of Cape Town, specialising in mathematics, computer science, and statistics. In 2024, I was a research intern at Amazon Berlin, working on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation with Prabhu Teja and Giovanni Zappella.
Personality I believe in leadership by example. I see honesty, humility, and kindness as the ultimate optimizations—free to give, invaluable to receive. Passionate and tenacious in research, I prioritise progress direction over magnitude. My happiest state? Rigorous mental stimulation, relaxed social interaction, and regular outdoor exercise. For leisure, I find joy in nature - sunshine, the sea, and snowy mountains.
News
[May 2025]
Reviewing for Conference on Language Modelling COLM2025.
[April 2025]
 | Fine-Tuning Pretrained Models with NVIB for Improved Generalisation F. Fehr, A. E. Baia, X. Chang, A. C. Coman, K. El Hajal, D. El Zein, S. Kumar, J. P. Zuluaga-Gomez, A. Cavallaro, D. Teney, J. Henderson ICLR Workshop SCSL, 2025. (Paper) (Poster) (Code) |
[March 2025]
Reviewing for The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL2025.
[February 2025]
I wrote my first blog post! It’s a reflection on my research internship at Amazon and living in Berlin. Interning at Amazon Berlin 2024: the Grind, Growth, and Gratitude
[December 2024]
Completed my research internship at Amazon, Berlin. They are tackling ambitious, unsolved problems, building AI agents to assist software engineers. I worked in improving retrieval for code editing agents. Special thanks to Prabhu Teja and Giovanni Zappella!