Luke Harries

Hi! I'm an entrepreneur and software engineer

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About Me

I'm on a mission to solve real problems at scale.

To date, I've approached this in several ways: building companies; working as a contract software engineer developing websites, apps, and machine learning pipelines; and consulting for early-stage tech startups on product development, technical hiring, and outsourcing.

I'm a co-founder of Fella (YC W20) - a startup helping men to tackle binge eating.

Previously, I was an AI Resident at Microsoft Research working on deep reinforcement learning. Before, I studied the MSc in Computer Science at UCL, completing my thesis with Cambridge Cancer Genomics, a Y Combinator backed BioTech Startup. I studied pre-med at Cambridge where I was the founding President of the Cambridge StartUp Society hosting events with startup founders and venture capitalists. My work on cognitive neuroscience was published. Alongside, I co-founded Proteam, which we grew to be the largest platform for intra-university sport in the UK with 9,000+ users.

Guides

Building credit - why it matters and how to do it? (UK)

April 12, 2020

Why should you care about credit? Sometime in the future, you’ll want a phone, car, or house. Unless you have the cash to buy these outright…

Launching a HIPAA compliant MVP

April 03, 2020

This is a guide for early-stage HealthTech startups who want to launch an MVP quickly and cheaply while following HIPAA regulation. It's the guide that I wish I had when setting up infrastructure for COVID-19 drive-through testing.

Useful resources

January 01, 2020

A collection of tools, guides, and courses that I found useful or wish I had found earlier! The topics include Computer Science, Machine…

Blog Posts

Trustpilot and misaligned incentives

November 08, 2020

💡 TL;DR Trustpilot and Glassdoor are PR agencies for companies. Not impartial review platforms for customers. This creates a challenging…

What's the God mode?

March 31, 2020

If God were to design a login screen what would it look like? You wouldn’t need to remember 8-alphanumeric characters from 3 years ago. You…

The hidden power of HackerNews search

July 29, 2018

Hacker News Search is my go-to search engine Hacker News (HN) is fantastic for keeping up to date with the latest advancements in startup…

Notes

Copy pocket highlights to your clipboard

April 07, 2020

Enter the following snippet into your chrome developer console

Creating a new GSuite file

April 07, 2020

To quickly create a new GSuite file, use the following links: https://sheets.new to create a new Google Sheet https://docs.new to create a…

News

2020

1st January - I'm based in San Francisco until the Summer

2019

8th December - Our work combining graph neural networks and deep reinforcement learning will be presented at the Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop at NeurIPS
16th September - I'm building a new company focused on augmenting human capabilities with AI. More details soon!
13th September - Today was my last day at Microsoft Research. Here are a few of my highlights
4th September - I will be speaking at the London PyTorch meetup on Mental Models for Deep Learning
22nd - 29th July - I will be in San Francisco for Interact
9th - 16th June - I will be at ICML 2019 in Long Beach presenting MazeExplorer at the "Understanding and Improving Generalization in Deep Learning" workshop
23rd March - I will be leading a workshop on Deep Learning for Detecting Disease at the Imperial Medical Student's Coding conference
20th January - We won HackCambridge using in-browser machine learning to improve physiotherapy adherence!

2018

1st - 10th December - I will be at NeurIPS 2018 in Montreal presenting SomaticNet at the Machine Learning for Health workshop
17th September - I will be joining Microsoft Research Cambridge as the first cohort of AI Residents outside of Europe!

Projects

Here are two projects that I am proud to have led.

Deep Learning for Detecting Cancer Mutations 🔬

I completed my master's thesis with Cambridge Cancer Genomics (YC S17), leading the development of SomaticNet - a novel method for detecting cancer mutations.

The resulting paper was accepted at the Machine Learning for Health workshop at NeurIPS 2018 and the tool is publically available via CCG's website.

Proteam 🏉

During my final year at Cambridge, I co-founded and was CTO of Proteam which we built to solve the lack of organisation of University Sport.

The iOS and Android apps allowed students to follow teams, get notified of upcoming games, create team-sheets and much more.

We grew the platform to 9,000+ users across 6 Universities. You can find an archive of the website here.

Hackathons

From idea to prototype in 24-hours!

MyPhysio

🎉 Winner of HackCambridge 2019

We developed a tool to gamify physiotherapy workouts by using machine learning to classify poses. The aim is to increase adherence of at home workouts. All training and prediction is done in-browser using Tensorflow.js, reducing any reliance on servers and meaning your images never leave the computer - maintaining privacy.

VisualCognition

🎉 Winner of HackCambridge's Microsoft Prize 2018

For the millions of people with Visual Impairments, images online are inaccessible. We created a chrome extension which uses machine learning to automatically generate the missing image captions. The captions describe what's in the photo, who they are, and what any text says.

Visit VisualCognition.co for more information.

SeeingSight

🎉 Winner of Allia's Serious Impact Hackathon 2017

We created the proof of concept for faster, cheaper and more accurate screening of Macular Degeneration. It is built for Google Cardboard which turns any phone into a VR headset.

Our solution has three parts:
1. Mapping the functional visual field
2. Increasing awareness of what it's like living with MD
3. Warping a real-time camera feed to move images out of your blind spot

Visit Github for more information.