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  • Productive Healthy Work Lives Ltd
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dznicol/README.md

David Nicol

CTO & Technical Lead at Bravyn - building AI-powered leadership coaching. Hands-on tech leader specialising in conversational AI, multi-agent orchestration, RAG architectures, and context engineering.

I build things end-to-end: from infrastructure (AWS/Terraform/Kubernetes) through backend systems to AI pipelines and user experience. Career spanning fintech, video delivery (local and broadcast IP), e-commerce, and now AI/ML.

What I'm working on

Bravyn - AI leadership coaching platform with full-screen avatar-based coaching on iOS and Android. React Native, on-device speech recognition and synthesis (native modules), Python/FastAPI, multi-agent orchestration, streaming inference, LLM observability, Ruby on Rails, AWS

Bravyn avatar coaching — recognised speech rendered live in the voice toolbar Bravyn avatar coaching — live transcript of a coaching conversation over the full-screen avatar

Real-time avatar coaching: on-device speech recognition and voice synthesis drive a full-screen avatar, with the live transcript over the scene and recognised speech surfaced in the voice bar.

RefTracker - computer vision + Gemini pipeline that tracks rugby referees and explains their decisions. YOLOv8, BoTSORT/CLIP-ReID, OpenCV, Supervision

Colour-first referee tracking shown at three zoom levels: wide, match area, and close-up

YOLOv8 person detection picks the referee by their unique kit (shirt) colour every frame, falling back to multi-object tracking (BoTSORT + CLIP-ReID) when the colour isn't separable. Velocity clamping to real running speeds, camera-motion compensation, and teleport detection (rejecting physically impossible between-frame jumps) keep the marker locked to the right person — who is only ~40px tall in the original 1920×1080 footage. The three panels are a single tracking pass shown at three zoom levels.

Research

  • Effective Conversational Closure in Supportive Dialogue (with Ruyi Wang et al.) - pre-publication, targeting EMNLP 2026 Industry Track. A four-dimensional latent-space classifier that steers a coaching model at inference time, addressing maintenance bias and termination inertia. Production system outperforms baseline models across 85% of real sessions.

Areas of focus

  • AI/ML - LLM application development, multi-agent orchestration, RAG, context engineering, evaluation and safety pipelines, conversational AI, computer vision
  • Infrastructure - AWS, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, IP networking, video delivery
  • Product - 0-to-1 product architecture, UX-driven development, full-stack delivery

Connect

LinkedIn

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  1. reftracker reftracker Public

    AI referee tracking for rugby — YOLOv8 + BoTSORT/CLIP-ReID + Gemini 2.5 Flash

    Python 1

  2. ragstack-astradb ragstack-astradb Public template

    Forked from michelderu/ragstack-astradb

    A reusable leave-behind for enterprise customers showing the differentiator of using the best Vector Store in the world: Astra DB

    Python