About Ed Minnett
Ed is the Lead AI Engineer for the Ally product at Spirit AI in London, England. He also spends time exploring, thinking about, and writing about AI through this website (as you will have no doubt gathered).
Ed first became interested in machine learning soon after completing his degree in environmental design, but at the time it was a topic that was hard to access outside of graduate studies in computer science. Instead, he pursued work as a web developer which was far more accessible for someone who was largely self taught. When Stanford announced their massively open online course (MOOC) experiment in 2011, Ed participated in the AI course taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun and the machine learning course taught by Andrew Ng. For 8 years following these courses, Ed continued his career in software engineering as a web developer while studying AI and machine learning in his spare time. In 2019 he successfully made the transition from web development to AI engineering. You can read more about Ed’s transition into AI engineering here.
Ed is also an avid wildlife photographer and loves to spend time patiently observing wildlife when not at the computer.
It is probably best not to think too hard about what it says about Ed that two of the activities he enjoys most are to quietly observe nature and work with computers. Despite what you might be thinking, Ed is actually quite good with people (at least that’s what they tell him).
About this website
The use of hedgehogs in the design of this site is a nod to the fact that the hedgehogs in Ed’s garden are his favourite wildlife subject. Everyone loves hedgehogs! If you don’t like hedgehogs, don’t mention this to Ed. This will upset him and you’ll end up having to explain your outrageous opinion.
The image used as a background for the menu of the site was created by applying the generative AI art technique of style transfer to one of Ed’s hedgehog photos. The style was applied from {TODO: finish this once I’ve settled on the image I’ll use}
If you are interested in reading more about what to expect from this website, this post is a good place to start.
