Guy Torbet
Skiing in France
Tignes, France

About

I'm currently studying Artificial Intelligence & Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh and will graduate in 2025 with expected first-class honours.

My interests include deep learning, finance, chess, poker, guitars and skiing.

I also invest in early-stage startups solving novel problems.

Reach me: [email protected], CV

Work

HackerNoon

2021-2024

Software Engineer

  • I joined HackerNoon as an intern during my penultimate year of high school and stayed on as a permanent developer throughout my first 3 years of university.
  • HackerNoon 3.0: Lead the development of a full migration to SvelteKit & Postgres. Resulted in web vitals gains of over 20% and hosting cost reductions of ~40%.
  • AI Infrastructure: Designed and implemented a scalable hosting infrastructure for internal models using Kubernetes and Google Cloud which powers the AI features in the editor.
  • Metrics: Developed a distributed internal analytics system to accurately measure key metrics while maintaining user privacy.
  • Editor: Improved the editor experience by implementing a variety of features including a custom markdown parser, real-time collaboration and a custom image editor.
  • NFTs: Minted 20,000+ NFT awards for top authors using a custom smart contract on the Polygon blockchain.
  • Comments & Notifications: Built a robust comment and notification system, including real-time updates, admin moderation panel and comment threading.

Alpha Data

2020-2021

Hardware Engineer Intern

  • Collaborated with the Edinburgh team to enhance FPGA testing processes.
  • Learned VHDL and Verilog and wrote tests to detect defects in manufacturing.

Projects

Blunder

(code)

Cheat Detector for Online Chess

  • Designed and implemented a variety of deep learning models to detect the use of engines in online chess games.
  • Generated a novel dataset using Maia & Stockfish to represent selective cheating.
  • My model reached an accuracy of 92%, surpassing the Stanford PhD benchmark by ~14%.

AutoTab

(code)

AI Guitar Tab Generator

  • Built a deep learning model to generate guitar tabs from audio input using a custom dataset of 10,000+ songs.
  • Utilised a transformer model with Mel-Spectogram encoding to learn the relationship between audio and tablature.
  • Achieved an accuracy of 85% on a held-out test set, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 10%.

Synapse

Educational AutoGrad Engine

  • Developed a custom autograd engine in Python to learn the fundamentals of backpropagation and gradient descent.
  • Implemented a variety of optimisers including SGD, Adam and RMSProp to demonstrate the differences in convergence speed.
  • Used the engine to train a simple neural network on the MNIST dataset to achieve 95% accuracy.

PintFind (Acquired)

(code)

Pub Finder App

  • Built a web app using SvelteKit, Turso & CloudFlare to help people find the best pubs and bars in Scotland based on community reviews.
  • Utilised the MapBox API to display nearby pubs and bars and a custom review system to allow users to rate and review locations.
  • Achieved over 500 active users and over 300 reviews before being acquired.

Bin Butler

(code)

Automous Waste Collection Robot

  • Built a robot capable of autonomously navigating a maze towards a user using SLAM & frontier exploration.
  • Utilised a ViT image classification model to detect the type of waste.
  • Manages multiple users and locations using a FIFO queue.
  • Won the SkyScanner Most Sustainable Project award.