Bio

I am a research assistant at The Alan Turing Institute supervised by Dr Theo Damoulas and Dr Ramanujan Sridharan. My research interests lie in the intersection of theoretical computer science and machine learning, specifically graph theory, integer programming, reinforcement learning and optimisation. I am a member of the London air quality project under the data-centric engineering programme at the Turing. Previously, I was a research assistant in the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick from Sep 2018 to Feb 2019, and completed my BSc in Computer Science at Warwick in July 2018.

Publications

O'Hara. P., Ramanujan. M. S. & Damoulas. D. (2019). On the Constrained Least-cost Tour Problem. arXiv:1906.07754

News

• Jun 2019: Speaker at CogX 2019 on The Alan Turing Research Stage giving a talk titled Running from air pollution: prediction, forecasting & routing.
• Apr 2019: Interview with Wired detailing why walking, running and cycling routes that minimise air pollution in cities is a difficult problem.

Running from Air Pollution

This project aims to reduce the amount of air pollution people living in London are exposed to when moving about the city. Specifically, I am researching algorithms to find running routes which minimise the air pollution of a runner starting and ending at the same point. This problem is NP-hard, which means finding the optimal solution is infeasible for large inputs. Therefore, research concentrates on heuristic methods. These heuristics are then analysed against lower bounds to evaluate their performance.