Hello! My Name is Matthew Zahra and I'm 22 years old. I have just completed my integrated masters in Computer Science at the University of Oxford where I achieved a First-Class with Distinction, earning my MCompSci.
Aside from my modules, I completed 2 dissertations. In my third year, I looked to optimise the memory consumption of the open-source cryptographic formal verification tool ProVerif - this was supervised by Dr Vincent Cheval. We made significant progress, proving complextiy bounds as well as coming up with novel compression techniques. My full write up can be found here.
For my fourth year dissertation, I looked to optimise policy performance in a formal verification setting, by utilising reinforcement learning techniques. Instead of naively applying these methods, I created a framework that still allowed us to provide robust satisfaction guarnatees despite the inherent non-determinisim reinforcement learning produces. I was supervised by Professor Alessandro Abate and Thom Badings. We made significant progress and are looking to publish our findings.
Last summer I interned with Castleton Commodities International as a Front Office Developer, focusing on API and event-driven development. I spent a total of 10 weeks at the London office, working on production level software and building internal tools.
I have also completed a 6 week internship with Go Reply in their London office, where I worked as a Cloud Consultant Intern, developing an application to manage and view medical data such as MRI scans (see below).
I am moving to London in the summer to start fulltime as a Backend Software Engineer for Palantir as part of their Foundry team.
Please feel free to download my CV from the icon or look through my socials. To contact me, my emails are matthewzahra04@gmail.com or matthew.zahra@balliol.ox.ac.uk.
