About me
Experience & Education I hold a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from EPFL and the Idiap Research Institute, supervised by James Henderson. My research established a principled connection between deep attention-based models and Bayesian nonparametrics for Natural Language Processing. My undergraduate (2018) and master’s (2020) degrees from the University of Cape Town, specialised in mathematics, computer science, and statistics. I also have industry experience at Amazon Berlin, where I worked 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
[August 2025]
Ever thought about jamming your favourite song alongside AI? This year at the Idiap Create Challenge (ICC) myself and colleagues will be creating an AI model for musicians!
Attending ACL2025 in Vienna. Hope to see you there!
[July 2025]
 | I successfully defended my PhD at EPFL! Here is a recording of me rehearsing for my defence. |
[June 2025]
I submitted my Doctoral Thesis! Nonparametric Variational Information Bottleneck: Attention-based Architectures as Latent Variable Models.
[May 2025]
 | CoRet: Improved Retriever for Code Editing F. Fehr, P. T. Sivaprasad, L. Franceschi, G. Zappella ACL, 2025. (Paper) (Poster) (Slides) (Video) |
Reviewing for Conference on Language Modelling COLM2025.
 | I ran my first marathon in Valais. With the special theme superheroes, I dressed up in South African colours and ate and drank loads of local delicacies! |