Ben Mccartney Email & Phone Number

Glasgow, United Kingdom

I co-founded Squeak Studios with three of my course mates as a company to perform small contract software work and release some of our own personal projects. We all worked full time on the venture over the summer of 2013 before returning to education or moving on to other employment. My role primarily involved backend software development and finance. We focused as a company on developing bespoke, responsive web sites using C# in an MVVM framework, and worked in a predominantly Windows environment with Visual Studio. I continue to apply small website modifications and manage hosting via Microsoft Azure.

Belfast, United Kingdom

I have been working on a PhD project involving research into the use of brain activity to guide an image retrieval system. This project has required understanding in the fields of signal processing, machine learning, computer vision, linguistics, and computational neuroscience. I predominantly worked on relatively self-contained scripts in Python for data processing and analysis, and applied a number of popular data science Python libraries such as Pandas and SkLearn. I used MATLAB and more specifically, EEGLAB and FASTER for preliminary EEG data inspection and data cleaning. I have also developed the personal and professional skills required during an individual research project, namely time/project management, independent learning, technical communication, and literature review. Over the course of this project I have presented my work at IMVIP 2018 and published a paper in PLOS ONE.

I was involved with a project investigating MS diagnosis using brain data. I provided technical assistance in creating a series of tasks for the participants to perform while their brain activity was recorded, I was also involved with consultation on the brain data analysis via machine learning. This position allowed me to put into practice the skills I had begun to develop over the course of my final year project, and gave me some insight into how larger scale research projects involving human participants were managed.

I took a suspension of my studies during my PhD research to take part in a full-time internship with BrainWaveBank. The company had begun work on their own headset for recording brain data, aimed at the consumer market. At the time the company was still a small start-up with five employees, so I was expected to handle all day-to-day decisions and tasks related to data science. This involved creating systems for automated cleaning of brain data followed by analysis using machine learning. I also created applications for clinical behavioural tasks and supervised recording sessions, and gathered some small experience in electronics. In this role I applied a similar technology stack to my previous experiences in the field, namely using Python to create behavioural paradigms and apply machine learning, and MATLAB to view and clean the EEG data. That said one of the tasks I focused on towards the end of this post was in implementing a fully automated preprocessing pipeline purely in Python, making extensive use of the MNE library.

I was employed on a short-term basis to help develop brain-recording hardware. I created a small application prompting a number of mental tasks such as a card-flip memory game and a Stroop test. I then supervised a 1 hour long recording session every day for a month where these tasks were recorded as the participant's brain activity was recorded. As with my final year project, I used the Python library Psychopy to create these behavioural paradigms. This post gave me some insight into how cutting edge research could be applied in commercial projects, and also gave me the opportunity to effectively run a small clinical trial.

I was a member of one of the newly formed SCRUM teams and was involved with the whole process of professional software development, from architecture through to implementation and testing.

Master Of Engineering (Meng), Computer Science

Education record