Interviewed and written by Nzinga Gardner, Business Operations Analyst, News UK

Adam MacVeigh was born and raised in South-West London and loves to swim, play 5-a-side football and has recently discovered a new love for scuba diving! He enjoys travelling and spent the first two weeks of January in Mexico and managed to get his PADI certification (Professional Association of Diving Instructors). Adam has an active social life and loves going to music gigs, festivals, exploring pubs, and walking around Victoria Park, East London. When he is not socialising, you’ll find Adam bingeing on movies or playing games (Strategy or FPS). Adam also loves reading and recently enjoyed Do No Harm by Henry Marsh and Rutherford and Fry’s Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) by Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford.

So Adam, can you give us an overview of your journey before joining News UK?

I was never very good at school. From a young age, I struggled to focus. It was boring and I was forced to go. I didn’t do homework, revise, or even show up to all my lessons! Often, I found myself in trouble.

“If only he could focus” might as well have been permanently stamped onto me.

This carried on through to university, I scraped into one through clearing and only applied because I was told it was the “thing to do”, “the next step”.

I wasn’t interested in the lectures and unsurprisingly, I didn’t complete my maths course. But despite racking up a ridiculous amount of debt, I didn’t feel like I had ‘nothing to show for it’, (despite what my father says).

I grew a lot, I made good friends, and relished independence. I loved my time there, not because it fuelled my passion to understand Fermat’s last theorem, as my UCAS application would have you believe, but because of the people I met. Personal growth aside, I was 22, in debt, and without a degree or any professional experience

Needing a means of income, but lacking options, I decided on a career as a lifeguard. It sounded sexy and I thought my life would basically be Baywatch. However, the reality was quite the opposite; the job was boring, uneventful and extremely humid. By chance, opportunities to tutor students in mathematics came my way, I ditched the whistle for a pen and through it I discovered I was skilled at teaching, I found fulfilment in witnessing my students develop and achieve their goals. However, as soon as exam season was over, the work would come to an abrupt end along with the income stream, so I had no choice but to go back to job hunting. It was at this point in my life when I spotted the government apprenticeship opportunities and decided to apply.

Describe your apprenticeship journey with News UK?

Initially I did not know what to expect from the programme, and I knew nothing about News UK. The initial stage was to assess my problem-solving and team-work skills with a group task. Listening and building off of the other candidates was key here, not shouting the loudest. At the next stage, I was expected to deliver an engaging presentation. I enjoy presenting, which meant I could lean in on my strengths. I chose to talk about something I was passionate about. I talked about how virtual reality could bring joy to people who, like my grandfather, were no longer able to move due to health conditions.

Being an apprentice at News UK was really enjoyable. The programme was well designed and structured, allowing each apprentice to get exposure to every part of the business. For the first time in my life I actively engaged in learning because the teaching methods really appealed to me; it was hands-on, varied, and I had a tangible goal to work towards. I worked in cyber security, back-end engineering, business analysis and amongst the tech teams behind News UK’s big title brands, The Times and The Sun. I was paired with an excellent mentor, the Head Engineering at the time, who after I shared my passion for the field to him, was instrumental in laying the foundation for my journey into Data Science.

What is it like to work at News UK?

I remember mentally preparing for News UK as a scary and intimidating place full of people rushing around in suits. In my head, a big corporation in a fancy glass building had to be some sort of shark tank, like on TV. But I was wrong. The vast majority of people I encountered were lovely and made time to answer my questions. Every line manager I have had has been incredibly understanding and supportive.

I can point to a few examples of why, for me, News UK has been a great company to work for. Firstly, as someone living with Anxiety and OCD, I have found the open and accepting environment of News UK to be a great emotional comfort that goes towards supporting my mental wellness at work.

Secondly, the work itself is fascinating. For example, the work I have done with The Times newspaper to train a model to try to understand human language has been an incredible experience and something I didn’t even know was possible a year before.

Thirdly, the people at News UK try hard to make others feel welcome and included. It’s an environment where I personally feel comfortable making suggestions, and where I feel safe to pose challenges during meetings.

What achievements are you most proud of?

Professionally speaking, when I look back at how far I have come in a few years, from knowing nothing about Natural Language Programming to actually building a NLP- based tool, makes me feel really proud. This was my first ever project as a Data Scientist — to build a tool that automatically moderates the comments section (several hundred thousand comments a week) and automatically flags inappropriate words and phrases to the human moderators. It is an amazing piece of engineering; saving many hours of human moderator time and brings with it significant social benefits: to make the internet a safer, less toxic, space.

On a personal level, the achievement that makes me most proud was the time when I was tutoring. The example that sticks out in my mind is this one girl who wanted to get into a notable college to study Fashion, but in order to get in, she needed a B grade in GCSE Maths. The challenge was that she absolutely hated maths and needed to raise her attainment level quite significantly. I was able to help her confront her weakness and raise her competence to achieve her desired B grade. She got the chance to pursue her passion.

Talk about the role of a Data Scientist at News UK?

Generally speaking, the role of a Data Science varies from organisation to organisation, from someone who conducts pure data analysis, to one who experiments and builds models, to someone who participates in the building of an end-to-end pipeline process. A Data Scientist is someone who uses the power of computers to support business decisions and experiments with multiple routes to test their hypotheses.

At News UK, a Data Scientist would typically involve understanding the business need, gathering the relevant data and pouring over the data before attacking it. We will then experiment with several different models or approaches before selecting the best one and then implementing with the tool, ensuring it accomplishes the business need.

Give me an example of when you overcome a challenge?

Personally, my biggest challenge has been managing my mental health condition. I live with Anxiety and OCD, which occasionally leads to panic attacks. On one occasion, I went into a panic attack in the process of delivering a presentation and that moment is marked as one of the most difficult experiences of my career.

The good news is I have come a long way with managing my condition and I am a lot better. Some of the methods I use are applying breathing exercises, Talking Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which really goes a long way towards helping manage my condition. I have engaged in CBT through NHS therapy groups as well as in 1–2–1 sessions, but it was the group therapy that I found most effective. It is oddly reassuring to listen to others share some of the very strange things they obsess over and that will probably never happen, and realise that you are not alone.

The other major thing that has helped is just being open and honest about my condition and sharing my battle with anxiety with my line manager who was the Head of Data at the time. I was going through a bad period and he was incredibly supportive and it made a world of difference. As a result, I’ve felt less anxious overall.

What are you currently working on?

I am in the middle of an interesting fact-checking project, the goal of which is to combat fake news and help editors and sub-editors save time fact-checking articles. In principle, the machine will go through each phrase of each sentence in an article and conduct 100s of google searches for each phrase and the algorithm will assess the likelihood of truthfulness. It will also rank the 10 most relevant pieces of web-related information for every sentence. The next phase is to integrate the tool in such a way it serves a form of fact-checking autocorrect feature which will underline the fact-checked phrases to point to the web searches to save even more time

What is your future ambition ?

I want to do lots of things in the field of AI. My most grand ambition is to do something to really improve the lives of people, especially in the field of medicine. One ambition which I explored as part of my dissertation, is to use machine learning to simulate medical practice to decipher from information on drugs and treatments to cure difficult and troubling diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. I am also passionate about space travel and it would be amazing to apply AI and machine learning in the field of astrophysics.

What do you do for fun?

At work I help run a networking group called ‘The Tech Community’ to run fun initiatives and positively contribute to the News UK’s culture. We successfully won funding from our former CTO after we pitched the benefits of our initiatives to improve company culture so we can run sports events, quizzes, women in tech events (which is now its own separate funded entity), Valentines events, Christmas events, and running volunteering schemes. One of the most rewarding volunteering events took us to the Sick Children’s Trust near Great Ormond Street which is a charity that supports the parents of sick children who stay at the residence attached to the hospital. Staff from different parts of News UK came together to make meals for the parents of the sick children so they had one less thing to worry about.

I have been a part of Harris Academy Peckham outreach events and got a real kick out of them. The aim of the school visits is to encourage females to take up STEM subjects through hands-on workshops bringing the subjects to life, in my example I used an AI-driven drawing application and created a competition between the girls. Because the children attending these inner-London schools are not usually exposed to STEM in a way that will influence their career decisions, these events help break down those barriers that are usually the privilege of more selective or elite schools. I am proud of the impact we made on the students, many of whom changed their minds and said they will consider a career in STEM after spending a day with us.

Join the Tech team at News UK and be part of our diverse community of talented people working in a dynamic environment where staff wellbeing is a priority and flexible working is supported. We want talented people from all backgrounds to join us. We will equip you with the right tools, and support you to develop your skills to help us solve really interesting problems and release new products at a large scale. Expect to be challenged as you support the technology behind the world’s most recognisable, and the UK’s most popular, news brands.