Richard Plant

PhD Student

Edinburgh Napier University

Biography

PhD student at Edinburgh Napier University in the Computing department, researching machine leaning and natural language processing technologies. Research interests include online media, public safety, privacy and data-driven decision making.

Previously a freelance web developer providing full-stack development project services. Former journalist, editor, manager, video news editor.

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Interests

Statistical Privacy
Language Models
Natural Language Processing

Education

PhD in Artificial Intelligence, 2020-?

Edinburgh Napier University
MSc in Computing, 2020

Edinburgh Napier University
BA in English, 2008

Manchester Metropolitan University

Skills

Privacy

NLP

Python

Machine Learning

Software Development

Web Development

Experience

Data Study Group Science Support

Alan Turing Institute

Jul 2021 – Present London, England

Provide academic advisory support to the Alan Turing Institute staff who set up and conduct Data Study Group sessions. This involves:

assessment of challenge proposals for scientific rigor
participant, facilitator, and principal investigator application assessment
providing training and support to participants
reviewing and editing group research outputs, including code, data, and written reports

PhD Student

Edinburgh Napier University

Mar 2020 – Present Edinburgh, Scotland

Researching machine learning technologies with a focus on privacy as a member of the Nature-Inspired Intelligent Systems group. Also involved in teaching and student support.

Web Developer

Freelance

Apr 2016 – Mar 2020 Edinburgh, Scotland

Freelance web developer, working on full-stack applications for various clients. My key focus was identifying and serving the needs of businesses and individuals by choosing the best technologies and platforms for their particular use-cases, and providing top-class development, maintenance, documentation, training and support.

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Text privacy presentation for EMNLP 2021

The presentation for our paper CAPE - Context-Aware Private Embeddings for Private Language Learning

Nov 9, 2021 Barceló Bávaro Convention Centre

Text privacy presentation for EMNLP 2021

Featured Publications

Richard Plant, Dimitra Gkatzia, Valerio Giuffrida

August 2021 Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

CAPE: Context-Aware Private Embeddings for Private Language Learning

Large pre-trained language models have pushed the boundaries of the state-of-the-art in NLP, but their use runs the risk of encoding unwanted private personal information derived from input texts. Our proposed system adds calibrated noise and an adversarial training objective to reduce private information leakage.

Recent Publications

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Kaustubh D. Dhole, Varun Gangal, Sebastian Gehrmann, Aadesh Gupta, Zhenhao Li, Saad Mahamood, Abinaya Mahendiran, Simon Mille, Ashish Srivastava, Samson Tan, Tongshuang Wu, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Jinho D. Choi, Eduard Hovy, Ondrej Dusek, Sebastian Ruder, Sajant Anand, Nagender Aneja, Rabin Banjade, Lisa Barthe, Hanna Behnke, Ian Berlot-Attwell, Connor Boyle, Caroline Brun, Marco Antonio Sobrevilla Cabezudo, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Emile Chapuis, Wanxiang Che, Mukund Choudhary, Christian Clauss, Pierre Colombo, Filip Cornell, Gautier Dagan, Mayukh Das, Tanay Dixit, Thomas Dopierre, Paul-Alexis Dray, Suchitra Dubey, Tatiana Ekeinhor, Marco Di Giovanni, Rishabh Gupta, Louanes Hamla, Sang Han, Fabrice Harel-Canada, Antoine Honore, Ishan Jindal, Przemyslaw K. Joniak, Denis Kleyko, Venelin Kovatchev, Kalpesh Krishna, Ashutosh Kumar, Stefan Langer, Seungjae Ryan Lee, Corey James Levinson, Hualou Liang, Kaizhao Liang, Zhexiong Liu, Andrey Lukyanenko, Vukosi Marivate, Gerard de Melo, Simon Meoni, Maxime Meyer, Afnan Mir, Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Niklas Muennighoff, Timothy Sum Hon Mun, Kenton Murray, Marcin Namysl, Maria Obedkova, Priti Oli, Nivranshu Pasricha, Jan Pfister, Richard Plant, Vinay Prabhu, Vasile Pais, Libo Qin, Shahab Raji, Pawan Kumar Rajpoot, Vikas Raunak, Roy Rinberg, Nicolas Roberts, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Claude Roux, Ananya B. Sai, Robin M. Schmidt, Thomas Scialom, Tshephisho Sefara, Saqib N. Shamsi, Xudong Shen, Haoyue Shi, Yiwen Shi, Anna Shvets, Nick Siegel, Damien Sileo, Jamie Simon, Chandan Singh, Roman Sitelew, Priyank Soni, Taylor Sorensen, William Soto, Aman Srivastava, KV Aditya Srivatsa, Tony Sun, Mukund Varma T, A Tabassum, Fiona Anting Tan, Ryan Teehan, Mo Tiwari, Marie Tolkiehn, Athena Wang, Zijian Wang, Gloria Wang, Zijie J. Wang, Fuxuan Wei, Bryan Wilie, Genta Indra Winata, Xinyi Wu, Witold Wydmański, Tianbao Xie, Usama Yaseen, M. Yee, Jing Zhang, Yue Zhang (2021). NL-Augmenter: A Framework for Task-Sensitive Natural Language Augmentation. arXiv.

PDF Code

Richard Plant, Oleksandr Deineha, Charlotte Grace, Samruddhi Mhatre, Tanut Treetanthiploet, Daniel Valdenegro, Liang Zhou, Oliver Strickson (2021). Data Study Group Final Report: Department for Work and Pensions. ATI Data Study Group.

PDF Project DOI

Richard Plant, Dimitra Gkatzia, Valerio Giuffrida (2021). CAPE: Context-Aware Private Embeddings for Private Language Learning . Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

PDF Code