Rolf Baxter Email & Phone Number

United Kingdom

United Kingdom

United Kingdom

Venture base was founded to provide advisory services to early-stage, deep-tech start-ups. Services include entrepreneurial mentoring, training, technical due diligence, strategic advice, fundraising support, systems engineering design, and software / systems prototyping.

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

I am an awardee of the Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence.This award is highly competitive and prestigious, and supports highly experienced entrepreneurs to work with a host institution to increase the knowledge and awareness in UK universities of cutting edge industrial science, research and innovation. Working within the Department of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, I am promoting entrepreneurial pathways and providing start-up training and guidance to PhD students and early career researchers.

Belfast City, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom

As co-founder and CTO of Zenith AI, I was involved in all matters of company formation and the building of our technical team. After raising a significant seed round with my co-founders, I led the development of our AI engine and technical infrastructure. Our goal: To embody a multi-disciplinary R&D team into software to accelerate others with their adoption of AI. Zenith was rapidly acquired by Opentrons Labworks in 2021. My role combined my company-building experience, research skills in AI, and knowledge of developing real-world systems, to pro-actively define our technology strategy and oversee all technical aspects of the company. Aside from leading our 13-person R&D team, I also led multiple projects, interfaced with external partners and, after acquisition, liaised with stakeholders across the broader enterprise to facilitate their adoption of AI.

Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom

Recognised as having the necessary skills and knowledge required to bridge the gap between long-term research and medium/short-term product development, the responsibilities of my previous role were extended to all R&D activity across the organisation. This included a major re-structuring of different R&D teams and a new focus on providing cohesion and standardisation across R&D.

Belfast, United Kingdom

As a member of the senior management team I worked with a broad and talented team spanning the breadth of the organisation. I was responsible for providing the vision and leadership of research engineering within ANV.Labs: A global team of 50+ Researchers and Research Engineers. More broadly, I sat at the interface between Research, Product and Core Infrastructure ensuring we were able to quickly deliver impactful innovation across multiple verticals to benefit the business. Quality, Agility, Impact and Efficiency were and remain central in my technology vision. I monitored the efficacy of processes and organisational structures within ANV.Labs and the company at large, identifying areas for improvement, proposing new strategies and leading change.I contributed to AnyVision’s long-term technology vision, driving innovation in support of new products and verticals. I led efforts to monitor and assess research and engineering quality to drive higher standards of innovation. I identified and initiated knowledge-sharing practices across the company, promoting ANV.Labs globally and ensuring cohesion cross-company. I directly lead the Analytics Research group, focusing on higher-level inferance for general scene and behaviour understanding.

Belfast, United Kingdom

As the Head of Implementation I hold overall responsibility for the successful transition of our research into production. I co-ordinated and managed resources in our UK research centre, managed time lines, priorities, and expectations, and act as the interface between the research team and the development and business teams. I was also the general manager for the research centre reporting to the c-level executive team. Responsibilities included budgeting for the UK team, recruitment/retention, developing and advising on policies and procedures, and management of support staff.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

I was a senior researcher in the VisionLab, developing novel algorithms for contextual modelling and anomaly detection under the university defence research collaboration (UDRC).My work addressed the problem of identifying interesting (abnormal) behaviour from large streaming datasets in real-time. Wide area motion imagery (WAMI) was the primary application domain, although the algorithms developed generalised and were equally applicable to homeland security, assisted living, animal conservation technology and numerous other applications. Machine learning algorithms based on clustering and kernel density estimation were being developed using C# and Matlab.In additional to my primarily research, I also had responsibility for managing numerous other research projects on anomaly detection and multi-modal signal processing. This included managing and supervising research staff/students, liaising with project funders, technical and high-level reporting.Please see my Research Gate profile for recent publications.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

During my time at Scott Logic I have worked as a financial software consultant for Baillie Gifford (large Asset Management firm). This position required complete integration into Baillie Gifford's development team where I was involved in complete life cycle development of their in-house Front Office Systems application. This included (but not limited to) gathering requirements from Business Analysts, Fund Managers and Investment Assistants, analysis and design, rapid 'proof-of-concept' development and production-level development. Software was primarily developed using Microsoft C# .Net and Oracle SQL, where I was responsible for developing systems for maintaining financial instrument and company data, providing data export facilities (Excel, PDF, Printing), and producing tools to aid order generation (financial portfolio management).Whilst in this role I have was keen to continue developing my technical skills and started practicing Test Driven Development.

I was the sole researcher on a project developing cutting-edge software for recognising human behaviour from surveillance video using Java. Recent advances in behaviour recognition have allowed long-term human goals to be inferred from observations, although many of these techniques rely upon the availability of detailed training data. Annotated libraries of video surveillance do not exist for many interesting behaviours, making there no clear path for training high-level probabilistic models. My work was concerned with developing new techniques that did not require training data.Aside from these activities my role included liaising with the project sponsor (UK Ministry of Defence) to ensure that requirements were understood and to obtain feedback on progress. I was also responsible for ensuring that milestones were achieved and delivered on-time, and thus there was also a project management element to my position. Finally, my duties also included the preparation and presentation of technical reports, papers and demonstrations to both technical and non-technical parties around the world.

As a software developer for a small financial services company I gained knowledge of developing software in a time-pressured and result driven environment. My role focused on developing their market leading ‘Wrap’ platform in an eight week delivery cycle. This involved finalising requirements with analysts and conducting design, development and support of new functionality. Furthermore, I assisted in the migration of the platform from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic .Net. I was also keen to introduce .Net functionality, documentation methods, unit testing and good design principles to fellow developers. This was in support of a central push to increase code reliability and maintainability in an expanding application and company.

As a member of a small team, I was responsible for providing infrastructure to software developers and testers. This included the maintenance of more than one hundred Linux and Solaris servers, in addition to offering consultation and planning services. A considerable portion of each day was spent discussing requirements with different customers, so excellent communication, team working and time management skills were a vital component of my role. I was also involved in discussions on deployment strategies and responsible for writing my team’s performance objectives.During this position I significantly reduced system build time and ensured procedures were repeatable by shell scripting several lengthy operations. This allowed my team to dramatically increase its capabilities without the need for further personnel. Furthermore, I developed other scripts to collate server utilisation statistics, allowing poorly utilised servers to be easily identified for re-deployment.

This position involved providing telephone support to Sun Microsystems support contracted customers. Varying response times and attitudes were required for different service levels, in addition to good documentation and customer service skills. During the position, I organised and taught two courses on network troubleshooting and was frequently approached by colleagues for my troubleshooting skills.

Msc, Informatics (Artificial Intelligence)

Activities and Societies: Course Student Rep

Phd, Computer Engineering

For details of my PhD research, please see my work experience details as a Research Associate at Heriot-Watt University (above)..

Bsc (Hons.), Computer Science