Dr Marek Grzes

Thank you for visiting my website. I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing at the University of Kent, where I research and teach topics related to machine learning and data analysis. I have particular interest in deep learning, representation learning, reinforcement learning, natural language processing and practical applications of AI.

Research Students

During my tenure at Kent, I have had the privilege of supervising several brilliant research students, whose names appear below and in the "Past Research Students" section.

• Piotr Sawicki - PhD student
• Peter Clapham - PhD student
• Theophile Champion - PhD student at the University of Birmingham (Howard Bowman main supervisor)
• Olivier Belan - PhD student
• Joshua Sylvester - PhD student (Rogerio de Lemos main supervisor)
• Simona Paraskevopoulou - MSc by Research
• Aidin Kazempour - PhD student
• Andrew Swinn - PhD student
• Cosmo De Bonis-Campbell - PhD student (Eleni Matechou main supervisor)

Past Research Students

• Lee Harris, PhD, 2025, now KTP Research Associate at the University of Kent
  Thesis title: Exploring Feedforward Neural Network Explainability Using The Layerwise Relevance Propagation Framework
• Lisa Bonheme, PhD, 2023, now Postdoctoral Researcher at the World Health Organisation
  Thesis title: The Polarised Regime of Variational Autoencoders
• Farhana Ferdousi Liza, PhD, 2019, now Lecturer at the University of East Anglia
  Thesis title: Improving Training of Deep Neural Network Sequence Models
• Adrian Wesek, MSc by Research, 2019, now Research Assistant at Imperial College London
  Thesis title: A Comprehensive Study of State-of-the-Art Word Embedding Algorithms for Natural Language Generation

Teaching

• Machine Learning Algorithms - COMP6004 with Christos Efstratiou
• Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery - COMP7004 with Alex Freitas
• Natural Language Processing - COMP6028 with Zhongtian Sun

Past Teaching

• Cognitive Neural Networks - COMP6360 and COMP8360
• Solving Problems with Data - CO584
• Concurrency and Parallelism - CO890
• Human Computer Interaction - CO328

Pastoral and Admin Roles

• Module convenor for the final year undergraduate projects: Group Project COMP6000 and Research Project COMP6200 (since 2017)
• Programme director for the Year in Computing Programme (since 2020)
• Module convenor for the Year in Computing project COMP5800 (2020-2023)

Code

• Incremental Policy Iteration for POMDPs
• Matrix Toolkits for Java optimised for MDPs
• Isomorph-free Branch and Bound Search for Finite State Controllers
• WEB-SNAP: POMDP-based Knowledge Engineering for Assistive Systems
• Evolutionary Learning of Decision Trees

Academic Genealogy

A fairly deep tree of my academic ancestors is here.