Dr Marek Grzes

Thank you for visiting my website. I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing at the University of Kent, where I research and teach topics related to machine learning and data analysis. I have particular interest in deep learning, representation learning, reinforcement learning, and practical applications of artificial intelligence to natural language processing, computational creativity, and cyber security, among others.

Research Students

During my tenure at Kent, I have had the privilege of supervising several brilliant research students, whose names appear below and in the "Past Research Students" section.

• Piotr Sawicki - PhD student
• Peter Clapham - PhD student
• Theophile Champion - PhD student at the University of Birmingham (Howard Bowman main supervisor)
• Olivier Belan - PhD student
• Joshua Sylvester - PhD student (Rogerio de Lemos main supervisor)
• Simona Paraskevopoulou - MSc by Research
• Aidin Kazempour - PhD student
• Andrew Swinn - PhD student (Elena Botoeva main supervisor)
• Cosmo De Bonis-Campbell - PhD student in stats (Eleni Matechou main supervisor)

Past Research Students

• Lee Harris, PhD, 2018-2024, now KTP Research Associate at the University of Kent
  Thesis title: Exploring Feedforward Neural Network Explainability Using The Layerwise Relevance Propagation Framework
• Lisa Bonheme, PhD, 2019-2023, now Postdoctoral Researcher at the World Health Organisation
  Thesis title: The Polarised Regime of Variational Autoencoders
• Farhana Ferdousi Liza, PhD, 2015-2019, now Lecturer at the University of East Anglia
  Thesis title: Improving Training of Deep Neural Network Sequence Models
• Adrian Wesek, MSc by Research, 2018-2019, now Research Assistant at Imperial College London
  Thesis title: A Comprehensive Study of State-of-the-Art Word Embedding Algorithms for Natural Language Generation

Teaching

• Machine Learning Algorithms - COMP6362 and COMP8362 with Christos Efstratiou
• Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery - COMP8320 with Alex Freitas
• Solving Problems with Data and Text - COMP6481 and Solving Problems with Data and Text - COMP8481 with Anna Jordanous

Past Teaching

• Cognitive Neural Networks - COMP6360 and COMO8360
• Solving Problems with Data - CO584
• Concurrency and Parallelism - CO890
• Human Computer Interaction - CO328

Pastoral and Admin Roles

• Module convenor for the final year undergraduate projects: Group Project COMP6000 and Research Project COMP6200 (since 2017)
• Programme director for the Year in Computing Programme (since 2020)
• Module convenor for the Year in Computing project COMP5800 (2020-2023)

Code

• Incremental Policy Iteration for POMDPs
• Matrix Toolkits for Java optimised for MDPs
• Isomorph-free Branch and Bound Search for Finite State Controllers
• WEB-SNAP: POMDP-based Knowledge Engineering for Assistive Systems
• Evolutionary Learning of Decision Trees

Academic Genealogy

A fairly deep tree of my academic ancestors is here.