Nicola J Buttigieg – AI Research & Communication

Bridging AI, Research & Communication

Nicola J Buttigieg is a Research Affiliate at the King’s Institute for AI and Co-Founder of the AI-vision student prototyping group at King’s College London. She is currently pursuing a PhD focused on Classical to Quantum Machine Learning skill transition at KCL. Alongside a Bachelor of Education, she holds an MSc in Computer Science with Distinction, providing a strong foundation in machine learning and computational theory.

With a background in applied ML and AI outreach, her research focuses on the real-world deployment of AI tools. She is also an experienced Computer Science subject teaching lead, combining technical development with curriculum design and technical communication.

Transitioning from an earlier career in the creative industries, she brings over 20 years of experience in education, spanning academic and professional roles across the UK, USA, Japan, and Australia. Her advanced training includes AI application development at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education and space-related STEM curriculum engagement through NASA Open Science and the NASA STEM EPDC program, a collaboration between NASA and Texas State University’s LBJ Institute.

During past tenure at the Girls’ Day School Trust (GDST), she wrote and launched a new pre-university STEM diploma curriculum focused on remote sensing, engineering optimisation, and machine learning for space technology. The initiative received support from the Royal Society STEM Partnership and the AWS Proof of Concept Program.

Presentations & Outreach

AI Software Tool Creation: Leveraging NASA MERRA-2 Data – AI-vision Seminar Series (2025)
- Hosted as Research Affiliate, King’s Institute for AI and Co-Founder of AI-vision
- Developed and showcased seven original ML prototypes leveraging NASA MERRA-2 reanalysis data
- Presented in collaboration with UKSEDS, NASA POWER, NASA DRCS/Biospheric Sciences Lab, OpeNDAP, RocketPy
Seeing the World Through AI – King’s Festival of Artificial Intelligence (2025)
- Live demonstrations of YOLO and CLIP in real-time computer vision applications
- Showcased YOLO-Mosaic Maker, Flask-based photomosaic web app prototype leveraging YOLO object detection
UKSEDS National Student Space Conference – Live AI Coding Workshops Integrating Python Toolkits
- AI Powered Aerospace Simulation & Launch Planning Practical Workshop (London, 2026)
- Flight Anomaly Detection for UAVs and Model Rockets with Machine Learning AI (Leicester, 2025)
- Model Rocketry & Aircraft Optimisation and Satellite Predictiive AI Simulations (Bristol, 2024)
Staffordshire University London – Engineering Optimisation, ML and QML Foundations with Python (2024)
- Coding masterclasses integrating NASA Earthdata Giovanni & AppEEARs, GPKit, RocketPy, Scikit-learn & Qiskit

Recent Roles

Research Affiliate AI/ML Engineer – King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Nov 2024 – Present)
- Designed and deployed ML/NLP pipelines and multimodal LLM workflows for QA and sentiment analysis
- Delivered interactive prototypes and production-ready AI systems leveraging retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, and summarisation
- Developed interactive prototypes for the NASA POWER GloCo Summit, NASA GES DISC Future of Giovanni Summit, and UK Race2Space, transforming complex Earth science and rocketry datasets into user-friendly tools
AI and Machine Learning Lecturer – King’s-Bolashak Programme, King’s College London (2025-2026)
- Delivered applied machine learning curriculum and led live coding sessions in Python for early-career scholars
- Training spanned predictive and clustering methods across supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning
- Introduced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for transparent document intelligence systems
- Investigated graph analytics and optimisation modelling
- Explored deep learning integrating explainability and adversarial robustness testing for digital forensics applications
Curriculum Writer – AI for Edge Computing: BCS Accredited Tech10 Certificate (2025)
- Authored for GDST in collaboration with Edge Impulse Inc., Cranfield University CranSEDS and National Space Centre
Technical Innovation Specialist Mentor – Boston University Spark! (2024)
- Innovation Program for Advanced-Stage Product Development, facilitated sprint planning, retrospectives & client demos

Awards

King's College London Public Engagement Grant 2025–2026, Quantum AI Horizons
King's College London AHSS Advanced Training Bursary 2025
Royal Society STEM Partnership Grant 2024, Project Lead
Women of the Future Awards 2022, Finalist (Mentor of the Year)