About Me
I am a Lecturer (=Assistant Professor) in Natural Language Processing, in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen's University Belfast. Below are two potential PhD opportunities for fall 2026 intake. I also welcome proposals on other topics within my areas of expertise.
I was a PhD student and later a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. During the time, I was a GAIL Fellow and a member of the machine translation group, EdinburghNLP, and Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation. I also worked at Aveni.ai as a senior research engineer, where we delivered the UK's first LLM for financial services.
I also go by Patrick or 陈品桢。Please feel free to reach out if you would like to discuss research questions, collaboration opportunities, or really anything!
Research Interests
AI and NLP research has become harder to pin down as we move from neatly definable tasks to messy, real-world problems. I remember bugging my collaborators about long-context modelling: How long is "long", what counts as "context", and what is the task? Ironically, those questions are precisely why we want artificial general intelligence. With that in mind, my research interests can be presented from multiple dimensions:
- Tasks: machine translation, multilingual and multi-cultural NLP, question answering
- Methods: long-context modelling, reward modelling, self-improving models, agentic systems
- Evaluation/reporting: scalable and reliable benchmarks, robust metrics
- Applications: AI/LLMs for finance and coding
Experience
- 2025-now, Queen's University Belfast, Assistant Professor
- 2024-now, University of Edinburgh, Research Associate
- 2024-2025, Aveni.ai, Senior Research Engineer
- 2020-2024, University of Edinburgh, PhD, advised by Kenneth Heafield and Barry Haddow
- 2023, Microsoft, Research Visit
- 2022, Huawei, Research Intern
- 2019, University of Edinburgh, Research Assistant
- 2015-2019, University of Edinburgh, BEng, 1st class & class medal for highest marks
- 2018, Goldman Sachs, Technology Analyst Intern
Personal
I enjoy travelling, cooking, and photography. I sometimes play badminton, basketball, as well as board and card games. Thanks for checking this far, and here is the reward for reinforcement—photos of my cat Luckie. Website last updated: 28 Oct 2025.