Adam Hornsby

data & cognitive science

I'm a Cognitive Scientist and Lead Data Scientist @ dunnhumby. I recently completed my part-time Experimental Psychology PhD @ University College London

I'm interested in memory-based decision making and the ways it can be improved. My research explores how people learn and leverage long-term memory when making preferential choices. I combine experimental psychology, big data analyses and cognitive modelling. You can read more about our research in this BBC article.

At dunnhumby, I develop and deploy machine learning models at scale. I'm particularly interested in model deployment, natural language processing and reinforcement learning algorithms.

If you would like to get in touch, please email me.

Papers

[ Thesis ] Hornsby, A.N. (2022). Memory-based Preferential Choice in Large Option Spaces. Doctoral Thesis, UCL.

[ Article, Code ] Hornsby, A.N. & Love, B.C. (2022). Sequential consumer choice as multi-cued retrieval. Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abl9754

[ Article, Code ] Hornsby, A.N. & Love, B.C. (2020). How Decisions and the Desire for Coherency Shape Subjective Preferences Over Time. Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104244

[ Abstract ] Hornsby, A.N. & Love, B.C. (2019). Inferring Value by Coherency Maximization of Choices and Preferences. Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making. Montreal, 2019. http://rldm.org/papers/abstracts.pdf

[ Article, Code ] Hornsby, A.N., Evans, T., Riefer, P. S., Prior, R & Love, B.C. (2019). Conceptual Organization is Revealed by Consumer Activity Patterns. Computational Brain and Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42113-019-00064-9

🥇 Winner of the Computational Brain & Behavior Outstanding Paper Award 2020


[ Link ] Hornsby, A.N. & Love, B.C. (2014). Improved Classification of Mammograms Following Idealized Training. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. 3, 2, 72-76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2014.04.009

Keynotes and blogs

[ Blog ] How your brain decides what you buy @ Medium. (19/11/22)

[ Slides ] How I became a Data Analyst... And then a Data Scientist... And then a PhD student @ UCL Career Talks, London. (24/05/19)

[ Slides ] Conceptual Organization in the Supermarket @ Data Science Festival (Lightning Talks), Facebook, London. (22/11/18)

Understanding Customers Better Through Neural Network Embeddings @ DataMashup, London. (21/06/18)

[ Blog ] Solving the Problem of Product Similarity with Data Science, dunnhumby.com. (03/05/18)

[ YouTube, Abstract ] Understanding Customers Better Through Neural Network Embeddings @ Data Science Festival, London. (21/04/18)

[ Abstract ] Understanding Customers Better Through Neural Network Embeddings @ RE.WORK Deep Learning in Retail Summit, London. (15/03/18)

What is Customer Data Science? @ University of Edinburgh, CDT Data Science Day. (14/10/15)

Awards

[ Article ] Industrial Fellowship, 1851 Royal Commission (2018)

[ Article ] DataIQ, New Talent Award (2018)

[ Profile ] Kaggle, Competitions Master (2016)

UCL, WHR Rivers Prize (i.e. 1st place undergraduate in Psychology) (2013)

UCL, Dean's List (2013)

Taught courses

Development Standards for Data Scientists @ dunnhumby (Co-created and taught) (2019-Present)

Applied Machine Learning @ dunnhumby (Created and taught) (2017-Present)

Work & education

Research Data Science Specialist (Lead) @ dunnhumby. (2020-)

Senior Research Data Scientist @ dunnhumby. (2013-2020)

Experimental Psychology, PhD (part-time) @ UCL (supervised by Professor Brad Love). (2016-2022)

Psychology, BSc (Hons) @ UCL, 1st (dissertation supervised by Professor Brad Love). (2010-2013)

Side projects

[ Code ] Experimenting with batch reinforcement learning. ~2018.

[ Code ] MNIST pixel in-painting (experimenting with RNNs in TensorFlow). ~2017

[ Viz, Code ] Visualisations of taxi journeys in Porto (experimenting with d3). ~2015

[ Homepage ] Fist year revision notes from my Psychology BSc at UCL. ~2011