David Wilmot

Currently Staff ML Research Engineer at Rithum Previously: PhD, ILCC (Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation), Informatics at The University of Edinburgh

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

About

Machine learning researcher and software engineer with a background spanning academic NLP and scalable commercial systems. Over the past decade, my work has moved from building high-throughput risk architectures in financial services to leading applied ML initiatives, most recently at Rithum. I focus on bridging complex engineering requirements with practical machine learning, taking projects from making significant architectural proposals through to delivering end-to-end production pipelines. In recent commercial roles, I have led the development of robust AI solutions utilising generative coding and agent-based workflows. This involves building architectures for multimodal classification, structured knowledge extraction, and forecasting using causal models such as Double Machine Learning. Beyond the core technical implementation, I place a strong emphasis on team development and sharing insights. I regularly mentor colleagues, deliver research talks on emerging methodologies, and enjoy participating in internal hackathons, having recently won prizes for prototyping novel reasoning and data pipelines. Academically, I hold a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh. My research investigates computational narrative, focusing on how systems infer salience, suspense, and surprise through self-supervised learning, memory, and knowledge bases. This intersection of reasoning and memory continues to drive my open-source work. My current project, Shadow-Loom, explores neural-symbolic graphical approaches that combine semantic memory graphs with deep learning to better comprehend and generate complex structural narratives.

Experience

  • Travel at Career Break
    Jul 2026 - Present · 1 mo

  • Staff ML Research and Development Scientist at Rithum
    Apr 2023 - Jun 2026 · 3 yrs 3 mos

  • Machine Learning Scientist at Sense Street
    Sep 2022 - Apr 2023 · 8 mos

  • ML Research and Devopment (Acquired by Rithum) at CADEERA
    Jun 2022 - Aug 2022 · 3 mos

  • Phd, ILCC (Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation), Informatics at The University of Edinburgh
    Jan 2018 - Jul 2022 · 4 yrs 7 mos