I was born in London, England - in the district known as Paddington, to be precise. If you know of the Michael Bond's "Paddington the Bear" stories, you may prefer to believe that I was found on the platforms of Paddington Station together with a battered suitcase bearing a "Darkest Peru" sticker, and with a label reading "Please look after this bear" tied around my neck. The suitcase was of course filled with bears' favourite food, marmalade sandwiches.
I read mathematics and computer science at St. John's College, Cambridge. After a short stint working in the software industry in England, I moved to Sweden in 1982, and spent three years working for an English software company (on the premises of their Swedish client). Then in 1985 I moved to the Boston area to work for Raytheon Company in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Specializing in tracking and data association problems, I worked on air traffic control systems that Raytheon developed for the governments of Canada, Germany and Norway. I also worked on the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) system for the U.S. government's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). TDWR is rumoured to be the only project in FAA history to be completed on time and under budget.
While working at Raytheon I started coursework at Boston University on a part-time basis, and commenced full-time Ph.D. research in the Department of Cognitive & Neural Systems in September 1993. My research specialization was neural networks for speech recognition. Click here for a description of my research.
I gained my Ph.D. in January 1996, and returned to Raytheon to work on implementing enhancements to the DERD-X air traffic control system developed by Raytheon for Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH (DFS).
In October 1997 I became a self-employed Air Traffic Control systems consultant, based at the DFS's Test Center in Frankfurt, Germany, where I performed software maintenance and systems engineering work on Germany's air traffic control system (DERD-X, DERD-XL), implementing a series of mission-critical enhancements and improvements that enabled the system to remain in operation for several years beyond its originally-anticipated lifetime.
In Autumn 2003, after 21 years as an ex-pat, having lived and worked in three different countries, I decided it was time to return to the U.K., to be able to spend more time with friends and family among other things. Since May 2005 I've worked - with various breaks now-and-then - as a freelance consultant in the Speech Technology Group (STG) at Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory, working initially on text normalization and later on dictionary and voice building processes for the ToSpeak multi-language text-to-speech (TTS) system. As of January 2009, I have just started a three-month break from that work.
My professional resume is available in the following formats:
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