AI and ML Competency Centre, Staff
Meet the team behind the AI and ML Competency Centre
Meet the AI and ML Competency Centre team. We are a dedicated team of research software engineers, business technologists and trainers, excited to help people adopt AI and ML tools in their work. We have technical expertise in applications of large language models (LLMs), generative AI (GenAI), and machine learning (ML), and years of experience working with people in education, administration, and research.
Alwyn Collinson
Alwyn is Head of the AI and ML Competency Centre, focused on how the University can support use of GenAI in research, education and administration. He is interested in the effective and sustainable use of GenAI tools, particularly their impact on the humanistic disciplines.
Alwyn helped to launch the other Competency Centres in the Digital Transformation Programme, which provide similar support for Oxford staff interested in automation, cyber security, and cloud computing for research projects. He has previously worked in Digital Scholarship at Oxford and the creation of the Sustainable Digital Scholarship repository for research data.
Muhammad Haseeb Ahmad
Haseeb is a Senior Research Software Engineer at the Centre, where he supports ML projects across various domains at the University of Oxford.
The various ML projects across the University can involve researching and building AI/ML solutions and/or training and advice for various research groups and/or University departments.
Haseeb has significant software engineering and machine learning experience from the industry. He loves writing code and is passionate about ML, with particular interest in deep learning.
Edward Fauchon-Jones
Ed is a Senior Research Software Engineer at the Centre, focused on supporting staff and students across all areas of the University where there is need or hope to integrate AI leading to net positive impacts.
Ed was previously part of the Gravity Exploration Institute at Cardiff University and a member of the LIGO Collaboration where he conducted research into gravitational waves from mergers of black holes and neutron stars leading to his PhD in Physics and Astronomy. Ed was also previously part of the MAG Lab at Imperial College London where he worked as the Operations and Software Engineer for the Solar Orbiter MAG instrument.
His main research interests are in applications of AI to astrophysics and space operations, however he has a great passion for supporting the migration of methods between domains, and an advocate for knowledge transfer to enable and support the sustainability of others works and interests.
Dominik Lukeš
Dominik is a Lead Business Technologist at the Centre. Dominik has run workshops on AI in education since 2019, focusing on generative AI since ChatGPT's introduction in 2022. He authored "Beyond ChatGPT: The state of generative AI in academic practice" and contributed to "Transforming Higher Education: How we can harness AI in teaching and assessments." Dominik also publishes a LinkedIn newsletter on AI in academia and has spoken at international conferences, including AHEAD by BETT 2023 and the European Educational Publishers Group.
Dominik serves on advisory boards for MacGraw Hill and Bett UK. He has also been a guest on a number of podcasts discussing generative AI in education. Previously, he founded the Reading and Writing Innovation Lab at the Centre for Teaching and Learning Lab. His academic interests include linguistics, language education, and discourse analysis, and he has published and translated extensively in these areas.
Anders Reagan
Anders Reagan is a Lead Business Technologist at the AI and ML Competency Centre, with a strong academic foundation in human rights and peace studies, holding degrees from Uppsala University and the UN-Mandated University for Peace. Prior to joining Oxford, he worked at the Stockholm School of Economics’ (SSE) House of Innovation, where he played a pivotal role in translating cutting-edge innovation and AI research into actionable insights for business and society.
With specialized AI training from Impact Academy, Anders has lectured at SSE and international conferences on the latest applications of generative AI across research, education, and administration. He is particularly focused on integrating AI into higher education, aiming to advance strategic thinking, enhance communication, and improve the scope and quality of creative thinking.
Kelly Webb-Davies
Kelly is a Lead Business Technologist at the Centre and her academic background is in linguistics, with degrees from the University of Western Australia and the University of Melbourne. Before joining Oxford, she lectured on phonetics and phonology at the University of Bangor and was a Trinity DipTESOL-qualified English for Academic Purposes tutor and Technology Enhanced Learning and Language Lead at Bangor University International College, where working with international students and responding to their specific needs informed her practice of integrating AI productively to assist with their academic and linguistic proficiency.
Her focus is thoughtfully integrating AI into higher education in ways that enhance communication, reduce bias, and expand access to knowledge. She is particularly interested in how AI can be used to address the unique challenges of groups facing linguistic barriers and neurodivergence, creating more inclusive and accessible educational environments. She advocates for a balanced approach that maintains human involvement and fosters critical thinking alongside AI implementation and her work explores innovative ways to incorporate this philosophy into pedagogical and assessment design, ensuring that AI tools complement and enrich education.
Xavier Laurent
Xavier is the Training Manager at the Centre. His role involves developing, sourcing, and managing training programmes to meet users' needs. He is passionate about developing innovative training programmes that go beyond basic instruction, looking into the technical aspects of generative AI and related research. Another exciting aspect of this role is the opportunity to build new connections across the University to share different perspectives and facilitate knowledge exchange.
For the past nine years, he has been a Learning Technologist at the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL). He also has an academic background in experimental psychology and tutor cognitive psychology at Lady Margaret Hall, helping him stay connected to his academic interests in cognitive sciences and the foundations of AI. He also conducts research in the field of quantum physics, which helps him gain a solid scientific foundation to understand various fields of machine learning and AI.
