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Tom Yates

Imperial PhD studying Computer Vision & Robotics

I'm a PhD student in Andrew Davison's group at Imperial, working on inference in distributed systems. My research focuses on scalable, decentralised algorithms for inference and learning, with applications in emerging compute architectures and multi-agent systems.
If you're interested in probabilistic inference, distributed intelligence, information theory, compression or quantisation, lets jam.

Research

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Up Next Something quantised this way comes
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Contact planning for the anymal quadruped robot using an acyclic reachability-based planner Mathieu Geisert, Tom Yates, Asil Orgen, Pierre Fernbach, Ioannis Havoutis
Annual Conference Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS), 2019
Frontiers in Robotics & AI Best Paper Award

About Me

PhD Imperial College London
2025 – Present
Programme Specialist ARIA
2024 – 2025
Mission Operations Manager Anduril Industries
2023 – 2024
Digital Consultant Newton Europe
2020 – 2023
Engineering Science University of Oxford
2015 – 2019

Fresh out of undergrad, I faced a dilemma: a PhD, or a corporate job offer. I confidently embarked on 3 years of management consultancy and have been doing my penance ever since. I was briefly a member of Anduril's UK team, and spent a year at ARIA working on Jacques Carolan's neurotechnology programme, before finally realising that you can't do science if you're not a scientist.


Since then, I've been studying for a PhD with Prof Andrew Davison. My research is is focused on probabilistic inference in distributed systems, particularly using Gaussian Belief Propagation to make globally optimal decisions with only local knowledge. I want to make that process as efficient as possible.


Links I like:

Hijinks

I have a habit of participating in endurance events, but I've managed to stay clean since May 2025. A couple of highlights:

MDS start MDS running MDS walking MDS finish
Marathon Des Sables 2025
TransAt start TransAt helming TransAt midway TransAt thinking
RORC Transatlantic 2023