Employee Spotlight: Tom Hunter-Smith
Tell us a bit about yourself?
My name is Tom Hunter Smith, I am originally from the Scottish Highlands from a very small, very remote, very Scottish and very unheard of village called Aultbea. If anyone has heard of it please come and see me now. I’ve been working as a Data Scientist at LoopMe for just under 4 months.
Before joining LoopMe, I worked at the Office of National Statistics in Wales for 3 years. It was there I learnt my trade as a Data Scientist, working on outputs including Consumer Prices Index, Social Deprivation Statistics and perhaps more interestingly, on a research project analysing Twitter data as a proxy for measuring demographic change. They say that a career in government is either 3 years or 30 years so I hop, skipped and jumped down to the big smoke to work for PHD media where I worked on developing a set of tools for measuring digital journeys of consumers and evaluating campaign performance.
Why did you decide to join LoopMe?
Having already worked in digital media, I was looking for a place to work which was a bit more fast paced where I could be more involved in the growth and development of the company. LoopMe had been popping up in conversations at work more and more since first moved to London and already had a remarkably good reputation in the media world given the size of the company. The good words I heard spoken weren’t only that of the product (which is of course fantastic), it was also about the people who worked there. You guys all have a good rep – keep it up!
What’s your job role and day to day task at LoopMe?
Our Data Science team is roughly split up into 3 different parts; PurchaseLoop, Real Time and Device Matching. Me and a small team in Ukraine focus our time on the Device Matching – which is exactly what it says it is – matching together an individuals phones, tablets and laptops so that our targeting is more dynamic, relative and flexible. This involves a lot of coding – since we are attempting to match different kinds of device to each other, the models we train each have their subtle differences and require large volumes of data to be engineered to gain the desired level of precision.
What’s been the best moment at LoopMe so far?
Not to make it sound like it has been all downhill since then, but my first day was pretty spectacular when I was whisked out of the office to a posh manor house to eat, drink and play games for LoopMe’s 5th Birthday Party. It was also my birthday. It could well be the best first day that anyone has ever had ever.
Tell us a fun fact?
Last year I was the subject of a Channel 4 social experiment called “Life Stripped Bare” where they removed all material possessions from my life for 21 days.