outline biography

I graduated in pure mathematics from the University of Warwick in 1987, and joined HP Labs soon afterwards. My main focus for the first few years was on the application of AI techniques to diagnosis of electronic circuits. I worked on AGATHA, an expert system to diagnose PA-RISC circuit boards using structural principles, which was used to diagnose HP's RISC architecture machines during manufacturing. I then explored model-based diagnosis. In addition to publishing theoretical results, I developed a way of combining simple structural models with probabilistic estimates. This approach led to a system which was initially deployed internally to HP, and later further developed into the HP (Now Agilent) Fault Detective product. This is used extensively by CISCO, among others, and was the winner of the EDN Magazine Software Innovation of the Year in 2002.

While working at HP from 1994-1998, I also completed a part-time PhD on the relationship between Abductive and Disjunctive Logic Programming, supervised by Fariba Sadri and Bob Kowalski in the Computational Logic section of the Department of Computing at Imperial College, London.

From 1997, I focussed on agent technology, with a particular interest in applications in B2B e-commerce. I worked on negotiation algorithms and protocols, including collaborations with Nick Jennings of University of Southampton and the economist Nir Vulkan of the Said Business School, Oxford.

During this period, I became Department Scientist of the eService Markets department, and was responsible for providing technical leadership and co-ordination of a team of 9 research scientists. The research included work in the areas of representation of eServices and eService contracts, and reasoning for discovery, negotiation, orchestration and contract fulfillment of eServices.

I was also involved in Agentlink 2, and am one of the authors of the EU Agentlink roadmap for Agent Technology.

From 2002-2005, my research focussed on Semantic Web Services, with a particular interest in their application in B2B domains. I was the Chief Technical Architect of the European Union Semantic Web-enabled Web Services IST project. This role involved providing consensus-building, technical leadership and coordination of a team of around 20 research scientists working at 8 different locations across Europe. The research program looked at providing appropriate semantic enhancements to Web Service technology to enable both B2B and B2C eCommerce.

During 2006, I took a sabbatical to act as the Director of Strategy for Green Light Trust.