John leads the machine learning research group at Aylien – a Dublin-based company which uses AI to help people understand the global news landscape. John has many research interests, mostly falling under the common theme of building more intelligent machines. His work has primarily centred around three areas: natural language understanding, computational creativity (focusing on music in particular), and building large scale data infrastructure. Most recently he has been exploring representation learning, multitask learning and transfer learning, with applications in machine translation, summarisation, classification, and musical audio synthesis. John previously worked in data infrastructure and analytics at Open Knowledge and SoundCloud. He holds a Ph.D. in Audio Signal Processing and Computer Science from Maynooth University, an M.Phil. in Music Technology from Trinity College Dublin, and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from University College Cork.