I am a researcher at Google DeepMind working on improving the agentic robustness and tool use and function calling capabilities of Gemini. Before joining GDM, I built and led Cohere’s post-training team from the ground up, shipping the Command Nightly models that topped the HELM leaderboard, Command R+ — a best-in-class open-weight model — and the enterprise-ready flagship Command A. My research has received Best Paper awards at NeurIPS and ACL, and Outstanding Paper at EMNLP. Until 2025, I was co-chair of the Dynabench and the Data-Centric Machine Learning Research (DMLR) working groups at MLCommons. I also developed and taught the MSIN0221 Natural Language Processing module at the UCL SoM.

Previously, I interned at DeepMind with Po-Sen Huang and Johannes Welbl, and I’ve collaborated with Facebook AI Research (FAIR) under the guidance of Douwe Kiela and Robin Jia on dynamic adversarial data collection, improving model robustness and introducing generative assistants.

My PhD, under the supervision of Pontus Stenetorp and Sebastian Riedel with the UCL NLP group focused on the adversarial robustness of Language Models with humans and models in the loop. I have a Masters degree from the UCL Department of Computer Science and a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Malta.

Nov 2025

Speaker and panelist at the IVADO/MILA Workshop on Deploying Autonomous Agents in Montreal, presenting “Reality is Adversarial: Towards Robust Real-World Agents”. Honoured to be personally invited by Professors Siva Reddy and Yoshua Bengio.

Oct 2025

Gave an invited talk at the Imperial College London ICARL Seminar Series titled “Context: From Tokens to Capabilities”.

Sep 2025

Visited sunny Croatia to give an invited lecture at the Mediterranean Machine Learning (M2L) Summer School.

Aug 2025

Excited to join Google DeepMind working on reliable and robust function calling and tool use for Gemini!

Apr 2025

Invited talk at the London Machine Learning Meetup: “From Pretraining to Post-Training: Building Robust Enterprise-Ready Large Language Models”.

Mar 2025

Had a great conversation with Dr Tim Scarfe on Machine Learning Street Talk about the gap between humans and machines.

Feb 2025

Invited talk on “Build your own Generative Pretrained Transformer” at the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology (MCAST).

Dec 2024

Our paper “The PRISM Alignment Project” won the Best Paper Award in the Datasets & Benchmarks track at NeurIPS 2024! 🎉

Nov 2024

“Fishing for Magikarp” received an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP 2024! Great collaboration with Sander Land.

Nov 2024

Invited talk at the University of Cambridge NLIP Seminar Series: “10 Slides on Human Feedback”.

May 2024

Joined Tom Hosking at the ICLR ‘24 poster session for our Human Feedback is Not Gold Standard work. Thanks for all the interest!

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