March 2006 - Present: Post-doctoral Research Associate, Robot Scientist Project, University of Wales Aberystwyth.
See my research for more details.
January 2005 - March 2006: Lecturer in Information Systems, University of Greenwich.
Employed as course leader, in charge of a teaching team. Developed an undergraduate course module in Information Systems. Research activities included the development of a logical framework for template creation and information extraction with colleagues from the Bioinformatics group at University College London. Concurrently involved in interdisciplinary research to assess the role of rhetorical structures and argumentation in the development of evidence based policy.
November 2001 - November 2004: Research Fellow, University College London
Developed the Expectation Violation Analysis framework that identifies interesting information by means of identifying news and background knowledge that is logically inconsistent with expectations concerning the behaviour of entities in the real world. The framework also includes findings on the relationship between the logical entailment relation between expectations and the degree of interest attached to the violation of those expectations.
Industrial Experience
April 2000 - Oct 2000: Head of Technology, Balance Digital Ltd (Web publishers). London
October 1998 - April 2000: Software Engineer, Thomas Cook Group, Peterborough
April 1997 - October 1998: Co-Founder and Business Director, ActiveNet Marketing Ltd.
Education
November 2001 - July 2005: PhD Computer Science, University College London - Awarded October 2005
My PhD thesis is based on the work that I undertook on the EVA project whilst employed at UCL as a Research Fellow. There are three aspects to this work: the identification of news that is inconsistent with expectations (and therefore unexpected); the measurement of unexpectedness given a set of expectations; and the relationship between the logical implication relation between two expectations and the relative degree of interest in a violation of those expectations.
The thesis presents a theoretical framework and the results of simulations of key elements of that framework. My work has included an examination of existing information management techniques, the cognitive basis for interest, temporal logics, default logic, logic programming and lattice theory.
October 2000 - September 2001: MSc (Distinction) IT, Aston University.
During this course I focused on artificial intelligence with particular respect to machine learning, neural networks and evolutionary computation. My thesis presented research that I undertook to devise an operator for the genetic algorithm that was based on biology and that was not currently in use by the evolutionary computation community.
October 1993 - July 1997: BSc International Business with Modern Languages (2:i), Aston University.
Management modules included economics, finance, group psychology, organisational behaviour and statistical methods. Language and culture modules concerned francophone countries, past and present. The third year consisted of a work/study placement in France. During this time I developed near-native fluency in French.
Other Professional and Related Activities
Winter 2006: Developed a business case for, and communicated with industrial partners details of a plan to develop an open architecture for Robot Scientists using the Open Source approach.
December 2006: Lead the Robot Scientist entry to the British Computer Society SGAI Conference Machine Intelligence Competition (Winning Entry) Summer 2004 - Winter 2005: Course author and online tutor, Queen Mary, University of London Online and Distance Learning Unit. December 2003: Volunteer literacy, language and IT trainer, Crisis Open Christmas Project for homeless and vulnerably housed adults. December 2003: Delivered lecture series on "Information Overload" for EFREI (The French School of Technological Engineering, Information and Management) at the UCL Language School. October 2003 - December 2003: Tutor, logic and computational theory problem classes. Computer Science Department, UCL April 2003 - Sept 2003: UCL MSc CS Student Project Supervisor. May 2003: Searchspace and UCL CS Department PhD Poster Competition. Winner (First Prize)
