Sunday, November 9, 2008

First Posting: My Position and Background

I'm chief scientist at Thomson Reuters, where I am responsible for an R&D lab of over 40 computer scientists. This department has been in existence since the early 90s; I have been running it since 1996. We have a lot of expertise and experience in search, natural language processing, and machine learning, and have helped roll out many new products that rely on these technologies.

My background is in artificial intelligence; my Ph.D. thesis was on knowledge representation and inference. I have taught post-graduate classes in AI (Edinburgh U, Scotland), expert systems (Washington U, St Louis), and parallel architectures and algorithms (Clarkson U, NY). Prior to joining Thomson in 1995, I also worked at McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories, where I was a principal scientist and consultant to their Space Systems company.

My current interests are in the following areas: alignment of business and technology strategies in Internet companies, especially as this relates to R&D; the deployment of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies by content providers; and the fostering of innovation in technology groups through the use of free time and the promotion of knowledge sharing. For more information about my activities, feel free to visit my home page.

Please note that the usual disclaimers apply. This blog contains my personal views and perceptions; it does not reflect those of my employer, Thomson Reuters. My next posting will be a trip report on the Web 2.0 Summit, held last week in San Francisco.