Dave Bignell

About

David Bignell is a research software engineer at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, where he has worked since 2016. Before moving into research, he was part of the team that created versions 5-8 of the award-winning Sibelius music editing software (opens in new tab), a job which combined his engineering experience with his background as a conservatoire-trained concert violinist. In between software jobs and music degrees, he also spent two years studying Bible handling and expository preaching on the Cornhill training course (opens in new tab), whilst helping to run the music (and clean the toilets) at St Helen’s Bishopsgate (opens in new tab) church in London.

He’s still waiting for a project to come along that combines Bible teaching, music, and machine learning. In the meantime, he’s mostly working on the thorny issue of whether we’ll ever be able to train computers to play video games for us, or whether we’re going to be stuck with playing them ourselves.