Date of Birth: 12 August 1975

Nationality: British

My current research interests lie in understanding, engineering and modelling adaptive systems, both natural and artificial. My Ph.D. thesis addresses the issue of adapting real-valued actions in reinforcement learning tasks, with a particular emphasis on the use of unsupervised learning. My academic background is broad, drawing on computer science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and I am interested in focusing on research or application within any of these areas.

Study programmes that I have enjoyed include neural computation, cognitive psychology, natural language processing, and logic. As part of my postgraduate studies I have tutored various courses and also proposed and joint supervised an M.Sc. project on an application of genetic algorithms to robot learning.

I have been involved in a number of software engineering projects within both commercial and academic environments, and am familiar with a range of programming languages from C and C++, to Visual Basic, Matlab, Pascal and Delphi, Prolog (logic), Fortran (scientific), Miranda (functional), Occam (parallel), and 68000 assembler. Experienced in both Unix and Windows.

My other interests include music, mountaineering, squash, skiing and short story writing. I enjoy playing the piano, hiking in the Scottish Highlands, and have made a number of other trips to the Alps, Rockies, and more recently the Himalaya where our expedition climbed the highest trekking peak in Asia.