Rob Firth

Rob Firth is a Research Scientist at The Hartree Centre, with a specialism in Natural Language Processing.

The Hartree Centre is a high performance computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence research facility focused on industry-led challenges, and is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, under UKRI.

Working with partners across industry and academia, Rob has experience Language Modelling for technical domains, Transfer Learning with Small Data, and building at-scale document processing pipelines on cloud and HPC platforms.

His outputs notably include open tools for text mining Life Science literature, producing automatic annotation and relationship mappings of Protein Residue Mentions and Mutations, with collaborators at the European Bioinformatics Institute; enriching existing data and empowering researchers with higher resolution search and relationship insights.

He holds a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Southampton, where his research focused on the physics of Type Ia supernovae and their use in Observational Cosmology.