Welcome to my home page!
July 2010: News! I am pleased to announce that I have, at long last, secured a permanent academic position (albeit part-time for the initial period). In August 2010 I will be joining the faculty of the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. It's an exciting, interdisciplinary department, and I can't wait to get started!
Since November 2009, I have been working as a self-employed programmer, web developer and IT consultant. My first contract (still ongoing) was to develop a website and backend data processing algorithms for GYMetrix Ltd. You can't see much from the public website, but a YouTube video is available giving an introduction to the functionality of a beta version of the site. I am currently working on this and other contracts.
From May 2005 I have been Chief Technical Officer, and co-founder, of Timberpost Ltd, a company developing Artificial Intelligence-based software for fund management. We were working closely with a number of large banks and financial firms in London, Europe and the USA before the global financial crisis, but business has been less buoyant since then...
I spent most of the ten years before that doing academic research in artificial intelligence and artificial life. I have strong interests in biologically-inspired systems, and my PhD was in the evolution of self-replicating software agents.
From December 2004-May 2005, I was a Research Fellow/Programmer at the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems (ICCS), which is part of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. I was working on the EC-funded JAST (Joint Action Science and Technology) Project, programming an experimental platform involving eye trackers and a virtual environment. User documentation for my software is available here, and system documentation here.
From January 2002-November 2004, I was a Research Fellow in the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour, also in the School of Informatics. Within the institute, I was working in the Mobile Robotics Research group on the Hydra project, which was an EU-funded effort to develop radically new, biologically-inspired technologies for building robust, reconfigurable and self-repairing robots.
I have also held research positions at IC-CAVE, University of Abertay Dundee (a computer games research group), and at MathEngine PLC, Oxford (a physics engine middleware supplier for games companies), and commercial positions at Quantec Investment Technology in London, and IBM United Kingdom headquarters in Portsmouth.
Other things that keep me occupied include:
- I am an occasional reviewer for the following journals: Adaptive Behavior, Artificial Life, BioSystems, Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, Connection Science, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Artificial Intelligence
- I am (was/will be) a member of the programme committee for the following conferences: 2009 IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life, IEEE CEC 2009, IEEE CEC 2010, ALIFE 7, ALIFE 8, ALIFE 9, ALIFE X, ALIFE XI, ALIFE XII, SAB'02, SAB'04, SAB'06, SAB'08, SAB2010, evoMUSART2004, Bio-ADIT2004, Bio-ADIT2006, ECAL 2005, ECAL 2007, GECCO 2005, GECCO 2006, GECCO 2007, GECCO 2008, GECCO 2009, GECCO 2010, Workshop on Morphologies, Motion and Cognition
- I co-organised a track on open-ended evolution at the Eleventh International Conference on Artificial Life (Winchester, UK, 2008).
- I organised a workshop on the Co-evolution of Brains and Bodies at the Seventh International Conference on Artificial Life (Portland, Oregon, 2000).
- I set up the Artificial Life Research Programme in the School of Informatics, with the purpose of promoting interaction between researchers within the School (and anyone else in the Edinburgh area) interested in artificial life.
- I am an occasional reviewer of proposals for various national and international scientific grant awarding bodies.
Here's a handy map of the rest of this site: