Blog Archives

25 Jun 2026

The Mathematics of Transformers and Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are everywhere. They are extremely powerful, versatile and useful. However, many data scientists only use them as a tool, not getting to grips with understanding how they work from a computational and mathematical perspective, nor understanding why they give the output that they do. Yet, at their heart LLMs use simple […]

08 Jun 2026

Architecting the Future: An Evening of High-Stakes AI Engineering

Talk 1: Processing Thousands of Sensitive Documents for Retrieval Speaker: Brandon Lim, Senior ML Engineer @ Faculty Abstract: Most document processing pipelines look straightforward until you throw thousands of real-world files at them. Inconsistent formats, sensitive data, access controls, and scale all expose the gaps that prototype pipelines paper over. This talk covers the full […]

01 May 2026

Panel – Putting Agents to work: lessons from the frontline of Agentic deployment

The world has gone agentic (and we are not immune!) At Faculty we have over 12 years of practical experience deploying ML and AI systems into real businesses to solve real problems – we’ve learned a lot about doing it well. But agents are different. Come and listen to our panel of real-world techies discuss: […]

01 May 2026

Context Graphs: The AI Brain

As the enterprise shifts from simple chatbots to autonomous agents, the need for a structured “reasoning layer” has become critical to prevent failures at scale. A Context Graph serves as this missing infrastructure, transforming raw information into actionable intelligence by organising data as an interconnected network of nodes and relationships. While traditional SQL and vector […]

30 Apr 2026

When the Data You Scraped Might Be the Data They Wanted You to See

Most organisations that rely on web-scraped data treat it like any other data source: ingest it, clean it, build dashboards on top of it. The implicit assumption is that the target site served the same content to your bot as it would to a human. That assumption is often wrong. In a previous role I […]

29 Apr 2026

Holdout Experiments: Patterns, Trade-offs, and Lessons from Real Projects

This talk covers how to design and run holdout experiments based on practical experience at Deliveroo. Standard A/B tests are optimised for speed — but they systematically miss effects that only emerge over time or through the interaction of multiple features. Holdouts are a tool for closing that gap. The talk covers patterns used at […]

29 Apr 2026

From Three Data Points to a Price: What Building a Hotel Pricing Engine Taught us About Demand

How do you set the right price for a hotel room when you only have three data points? This is the challenge that we face for most hotel rooms which we price: a specific room type on a specific night in a specific booking window might have been sold only a handful of times and […]

27 Apr 2026

Conversation encoding: enhancing our understanding of text-based conversations

In this talk we’ll cover an approach we use to enrich our understanding of conversations, allowing for better navigation of historical conversations and highlight some possibilities that this unlocks to improve the handling of future conversations. Technical Level of Session: Technical practitioner

17 Apr 2026

The Fintech Data Product Playbook: From Idea to Impact

In the modern Fintech landscape, data is no longer just a byproduct of business – it is the core product. For Funding Circle, developing robust data products is central to navigating the complexities of high-velocity financial analytics. This session dives into the ‘Funding Circle way’ of defining data products and explores their critical role in […]