Professor David Wolfe Corne

Telephone: +44 (0)131 451 3410

Twitter: @dwcorne

I develop new ideas for solving difficult problems in optimisation and machine learning, and try my best to do useful things with those ideas. These days I like to think of myself as a 'Global Goals Engineer', working towards a subset of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals , focussing on transport, energy, water, climate and health.

At Heriot-Watt University, for an average of one day per week, I am currently mainly engaged on two projects; primarily Transit, and also Fedecom. (in time I will add more details of the projects and the teams).

The rest of my time I do optimization and data science in industry, with Trakm8 . My work with excellent T8 colleagues has led to several industry awards, and continues to transform the carbon efficiency of several very large vehicle fleets day after day. I'm darn pleased about that.

If you really want more of the historic detail, and/or academic KPIs etc, then over here you can find some very very out of date CV-style details. But I'd suggest you just email me if you want to know more about what I've done, what I'm doing, and what I'm planning to do.For publications, please see my google scholar citations profile. For undergraduates and MScs, my old teaching material is here.

Graduated Research Students

If you were a PhD student of mine, but are not on this list, please tell me what you are up to now. If you are on this list, please provide an update!

Hamouda Chantar completed his PhD with me in 2013, on feature selection for Arabic document classification.
I helped supervise Emma Collingwood's MSc at Edinburgh with Peter Ross, she then took over my research associateship there at the Deprtment of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh, became Emma Hart, and is now a Professor at Napier University.
Manjula Dissanayake completed his PhD (new methods for feature selection) in 2015 while working with me as a researcher on the ORIGIN project. He is a co-director of our startup, Auraventi, and a senior developer at Adobe.
Phil Dixon did his PhD with me and Martin Oates at Reading, and now works for Raven Research, doing both hardware and software for embedded equipment control and PC based control apps, adding to the product range at Raven Micro.
Ibrahim Ali Dongo started his PhD in 2013, and ended up looking at how social media analysis coupled with machine learning could provide signals useful to business analysts. Life interrupted things for a while, but he eventually got his PhD in 2021.
Osama Embarak did his PhD with me from 2007 to 2011, on a method for personalisation and adaptation of recommendations for websites, without violating user privacy concerns. Osama is now a Senior Lecturer in the UAE.
Hsiao-Lan Fang did his PhD with Peter Ross and me at Edinburgh, and then went back to Taiwan to work for a large corporation.
Jonas Gamalielson, was in the Bioinformatics Group at the University of Skövde (along with Zelmina, see above), and successfully passed his PhD viva here at HW in August 2009 - his PhD invents and tests teh novel notion of aligning bioinformatic pathways; I had the privelege of being his `official' supervisor, although Jonas was largely autonomous with day to day support from Bjorn Olsson, at Skovde. I expect Jonas to shortly obtain a permanet faculty position in Sweden.
She Ri Gu Leng finished his PhD with me in 2010/11, on combinations of learning and evolution for large-scale optimization. He now works for the Chinese Data Ministry in Beijing.
Muhannad Hijaze completed his PhD in 2014, in the area of migration schemes for parallel implementations of evolutionary algorithms.
I supervised Mark Jones' MSc thesis in 1998. He has been working for Tradeweb based in the City Of London since ~2002; Mark's role is C++ Developer/Manager leading the team responsible for developing and supporting Tradeweb's dealer trading software for European and Asian fixed-income markets.
Sam Khalifa completed his PhD in 2017, with a focus on multiobjective optimization in topic modelling, among other contributions including novel extenstion to the popular 'LDA' method for learning topic models. He is now a key member of the utterly amazing data science team at Trakm8 .
Both Dae Gyu Kim and Luis Francisco Gonzalez Hernandez moved on from their MScs supervised by me at Edinburgh to do PhDs at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences , University of Sussex at Brighton. Dae Gyu now works for a large corporation in Seoul
Joshua Knowles did his PhD at Reading with me, and was then a Marie Curie Research Fellow at IRIDIA , then a David Phillips Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, and is now a Senior Lecturer at Manchester.
Dome Lohpetch finished his PhD with me in 2011 on data mining and optimization in finance - he is now a Lecturer in Bangkok, starting up a research group in computational intelligence.
Zelmina Lubovac, now a postdoc in the Bioinformatics Group at the University of Skövde, finished here PhD in early 2008 - I had the privelege of being her `official' supervisor, although the day to day supervision was done by Bjorn Olsson, at Skovde, where Zelmina was based throughout. My job was to advise now and then, mainly in later stages.
Silang (Robert) Luo successfully passed his PhD viva in July 2009, with a PhD thesis that sets out an essential but overlooked notion in feature selection techniques for large datasets. Basically, to choose the right feature selection method, you should really look at some basic statistics of the dataset itself first. Robert and I continue to work together while he seeks a position in the UK.
Andrew Meade did his PhD with me and with Richard Sibly at Reading; he is now a Research Fellow in Biological Sciences at Reading.
Negin Moghim was a SICSA Scholarship student, and completed her PhD in early 2014, exploiting advanced ideas in machine learning to find ways to predict epileptic seizures in advance. She is currently working with me as a research associate on a project that aims to predict athletes' vulnerability to injuries, but will soon be looking for interesting work down South.
Martin Oates was a part-time PhD student with me while working for BT, he has since taken up the research life full time, or as full time as possible while you have a barn and other farm buildings to feed and children to build; he is an autonomous research fellow. working with me 20% time at the moment. Martin's thesis was the closest I have ever known to needing no corrections. In the end, he had to change the title, but nothing else.
Sunny Orike completed his PhD in late 2014 and is soon to resume his lectureship at Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Nigeria. Sunny's work advanced the state of the art in solving a range of important optimization problems in power distribution.
Sarah Price did her MSc project with some aid from me at Edinburgh, was the `Webspinner' for Fife College, and worked at the Institue for Computer-Based Learning at Heriot Watt University; she is now in a management role working for JISC in the area of IT Provision in further education.
Carey Pridgeon got his PhD in June 2008; during and since he does substantial personal research which we are hoping to get funds for, not least applications of his nmod system (which started as his u/g project at Reading)
Graham Rollings did his PhD at the University of Exeter, starting while I was there, and finishing with me helping remotely; this was about figuring out the locations of collections of sensors (e.g. they may be being blown all over the place within a cloud) based on RF signals. He successfully passed his viva in early 2012.
Usman Sanusi started his Phd in 2013, working on a feature-enhancement method for time series machine learning. A number of very frustrating adventures with the UK Home Office led to severe interruptions of his work. But eventually he got through his viva successfully in February 2022.
Mark Sinka did his Phd with me at Reading, sponsored and part-working for BankSearch, and now works for Mirago.
Mark Shackelford did his PhD with me at Reading, and then did a visiting research fellowship at UWE with Ian Parmee, and is now CEO of Advanced Computational Technologies; he also writes and sells Feng Shui ware.
Kareem Shaker graduated with his PhD at Heriot-Watt (following MSc in Exeter) in 2012, contributing methods for identifying authorship of texts from computational stylistic attributes. He is now working in software development.
Andrew Thompson sailed through his viva in 2014, with a PhD in self-organised cellular networking (LTE). He is now a research engineer at Amazon .
Alasdair Turner did his MSc with me at Edinburgh and then became a Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, UCL.
Marta Vallejo obtained her doctorate in August 2017, on using EAs for complex sequential planning problems; this followed her Masters and stints as a researcher on projects with Mic Lones and myself. She is currently with us at MACS, employed on a mix of research and teaching contracts.
Xu Wang has just been awarded his PhD on Artificial Intelligence for Financial Time Series Prediction, which he started at the University of Reading in 2002; I had the pleasure of working with him for the first year of his PhD, but then I left Reading, and Graham Megson took him through successfully to the end. Xu is now a Senior Officer with the Bank of China!.