Tim Taylor's home page

I work in the fields of artificial intelligence, artificial life and computer science. I am currently an independent researcher, working in Edinburgh, and also an external examiner for the University of London International Programmes.

I spent most of 2014 in Australia, working as a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Melbourne. During my time there, I developed Omnigram Explorer, a simple interactive tool for exploring complex computational models.

From mid 2010-early 2014 I worked in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, as the Deputy Course Director of the University of London's International Programmes in Computing (where we offered degrees in CIS and Creative Computing). The programmes had around 1200 students across the world, and my role involved both supporting current students and affiliate institutions, and also developing new offerings and new markets.

From May 2005 until late 2009, I was Chief Technical Officer, and co-founder, of Timberpost Ltd, a company developing Artificial Intelligence-based software for fund management. We worked closely with a number of large banks and financial firms in London, Europe and the USA.

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 January 2002 until May 2005, I was a Research Fellow in School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Within the school, I spent most of that time in the Mobile Robotics Research group of the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour, working 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. During the last six months there I moved to the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems (ICCS), to work on the EC-funded JAST (Joint Action Science and Technology) Project. This involved programming an experimental platform involving eye trackers and a virtual environment (user documentation for my software is available here, and system documentation here).

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, as well as working as a freelance programmer and web developer.

I hold an MA in Natural Sciences (specialising in Experimental Psychology) from Cambridge University, and an MSc (with distinction) and PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh University.