I am co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Timberpost, a company developing Artificial Intelligence-based software for hedge fund (investment) management.
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: ALIFE 7, ALIFE 8, ALIFE 9, ALIFE X, ALIFE XI, SAB'02, SAB'04, SAB'06, SAB'08, evoMUSART2004, Bio-ADIT2004, Bio-ADIT2006, ECAL 2005, ECAL 2007, GECCO 2005, GECCO 2006, GECCO 2007, GECCO 2008, Workshop on Morphologies, Motion and Cognition
- 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 organised a workshop on the Co-evolution of Brains and Bodies at the Seventh International Conference on Artificial Life (Portland, Oregon, 2000).
- 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: