Antigoni Maria Founta

Transitioned to Epic Games following the acquisition of Contex.ai in January 2023.

Led end-to-end NLP and ML projects for internal automation across multiple business areas, including content moderation and localisation.

• Built and managed datasets for ML applications: data collection, annotation design, quality control, exploratory analysis, and reporting.
• Trained, fine-tuned, and evaluated supervised NLP models — including transformer-based systems and LLM-based approaches — with emphasis on reliable performance in real-world use cases.
• Deployed ML models as production services using Python-based APIs and containerised infrastructure.
• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to define requirements, scope high-impact automation opportunities, document systems, and communicate progress and results.

Contex developed software for content moderation. I led data and research efforts for content moderation systems, with responsibility for textual datasets and contributions to the text-modelling workstream.

• Collected, annotated, analysed, and harmonised textual and visual corpora for model training and evaluation.
• Designed controlled experiments to measure how contextual information affects human judgments of toxicity, and to investigate spurious artefacts in toxicity models using causal methods.
• Contributed to the development of reliable moderation models through data-centric and evaluation-focused research.

Qustodio provides software for parental control. I was part of the product team, responsible for analytics and insights.

• Owned product analytics — defining and tracking product KPIs and SaaS metrics through dashboards and reporting.
• Partnered with product teams to deliver analyses that informed product strategy and A/B test evaluation.
• Applied statistical analysis to generate actionable product insights.

Marie Curie secondment for the ENCASE European Research Programme, conducting research on harmful online content — hate speech, controversy detection, and misinformation.

• Built and analysed a large-scale crowdsourced Twitter dataset for abusive-language research that has been widely used in the field.
• Developed deep learning models for hate-speech and abuse detection.
• Contributed to research on the spread of false or misleading information on social media platforms.

Member of the OSWINDS research group, participating in several research projects:

• Crowdsourcing opinions related to match-fixing and creating a visualisation tool to present project outcomes, for the Erasmus+ European Research Programme Fix the Fixing.
• Studying the impact of external resources on Twitter's information-diffusion process, in collaboration with Zayed University.

Collection and clustering of geo-annotated data from Flickr, in order to discover and study underlying patterns.

• Dissertation focus: causal-inference methods for NLP, with emphasis on toxicity detection, context effects, and the evaluation of model judgments against human behaviour.
• Current work studies whether LLM judges preserve human context effects in toxicity and sarcasm judgments, and develops methods to diagnose and reduce context-insensitive model failures.
• Member of the LAMA group.
• Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Department of Computing for several years, in courses such as Introduction to Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Python Programming.

Postgraduate programme focused on Data Science, with courses including Applied Machine Learning, Statistical Data Analysis, Web Mining, and (Big) Data Mining. Graduated with an A+ (9.54 / 10).

Graduated with a B (7.92 / 10). Thesis: "Extraction of Semantics from Multilingual Annotations of Flickr photos using LDA."

Spent one semester at the Informatics Department of Kingston University as an exchange student of the Erasmus LLP Programme.

SheSharp was a technological community aimed at promoting the engagement of women with computer-oriented technologies, through workshops, events, and hands-on projects. As founder, I led community management, organised and ran workshops and events, developed the team's website, and managed its social media presence.

DEVit was a 360° web development conference. I was part of the organising committee since its beginning, and a volunteer on the day of the conference.

Interviewer for the European Observatory report, focused on understanding the circumstances under which refugees and immigrants arrived in the country.