Simon Hughes, PhD

Simon Hughes, PhD is an experienced data scientist, ML engineer, and AI researcher with a focus on NLP, deep learning, and machine learning techniques. Simon has worked at various companies like Vectara, The Home Depot, Dice, Solstice Mobile, Matlock Capital, Rosenthal Collins Group, Fluensee, and Clarity Consulting. At Vectara, they are currently working as an ML engineer and AI researcher, where they are researching neural information retrieval systems and developing semantic search systems. At The Home Depot, they have worked as a senior data scientist, principal data scientist, and distinguished data scientist, where they built new models for retrieval and sorting and ranking of search results, worked on recommendation engines, and designed the future of the ML driven search platform. Prior to this, they worked at Dice, where they were the chief data scientist and led a data science team focused on building hybrid recommender systems, content optimization, SEO, resume parsing, skills discovery, and search relevancy tuning. Simon has also worked as an independent contractor for a hedge fund, trading engine developer at Matlock Capital, software engineer at Rosenthal Collins Group, Fluensee, and consultant at Clarity Consulting, where they used C#, VB, .Net, Java, SQL Server 2008, ASP.Net, and MVC to build various software applications.

Simon Hughes, PhD began their educational journey in 1997 at Durham University, where they earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Molecular Biology. Simon continued their education at the University of Sunderland from 2003 to 2004, where they earned a Master’s degree in Computer-based Information Systems. In 2009, they then enrolled in DePaul University and obtained a PhD in Computer Science with a focus on Artificial Intelligence, specifically Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Simon Hughes completed their education in 2019, with extensive knowledge in the field of Computer Science and a specialization in AI.