Dr Eli Sheppard CO09 Working in the field of robotics and automated machine learning
Eli Sheppard studied at Truro School in the 2000s, where his fondest memories were camping trips to Minions with Mr Golds (TS 1968 – 2007). Eli started playing guitar aged nine, and took lessons with Dave Stevens at Truro School, a skill he continues today. “Dave Stevens was a big influence on my taste in music - we used to jam the blues a lot which developed into my love of jazz and blues.” After completing his A-Levels, Eli attended Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh to read Electrical and Electronic Engineering, graduating with a master’s degree with distinction. Eli then joined the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics CDT (Centre for Doctoral Training). In 2016 he was awarded an MSc in Robotics and Autonomous Systems with distinction from the CDT, which led to his PhD studies.
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The topic of Eli’s thesis was “Multimodal Representation Learning: an unsupervised approach to symbol grounding*”, in which he focused on the use of machine learning to jointly learn language and computer vision without human intervention. The result of his PhD was a Machine Learning (ML) System which allows robots to interactively learn to recognise and name objects as well as their properties (e.g., colour, shape, size). Eli deployed this system on the iCub robot. The iCub is a state-of-theart humanoid robot developed by the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), for exploring developmental robotics. Eli explains:
