John is a student in the Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems (AIMS) CDT, which he joined in October 2024. He is supervised by Professor Nick Hawes and Dr Victor-Alexandru Darvariu.
Before joining Oxford, John studied Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, where he completed an integrated Master’s degree. His academic work focused on mathematical computing, probability, and statistics. During this time, he interned at Marine AI in Plymouth, UK, and later continued working with the company on a part-time basis. His work there spanned object detection and tracking in computer vision, acoustic classification, multi-modal sensor fusion, and general software engineering. Marine AI now sponsors his research, which focuses on planning under uncertainty in maritime environments.
His current research investigates the integration of learned methods with Monte Carlo Tree Search, with applications to underwater gliders.
