I was born in Windom, Minnesota in 1946 but grew up in England, going to school at Taverham Hall and St. Edwards, Oxford. After a year at Grenoble I studied Natural Sciences (finishing in theoretical physics) at Cambridge, then did a PhD in theoretical high energy physics at the Cavendish lab and Cal Tech.
I first got interested in the mind in 1964 at Grenoble - reading Ross Ashby, Grey Walter, Wiener, etc - but took a long detour through physics and computer science before returning to it in the late '80s.
My PhD was on Regge theory of scattering ('Regge models of pion and eta photoproduction', Nuclear Physics B57) supervised by Geoffrey Fox. My best work in physics was on light-by-light scattering ('Deep inelastic structure functions of the photon' and 'A fixed pole sum rule in photon-photon scattering', Physics Letters 1974) as it reveals the quark constituents of matter. Unfortunately the required experiments are very hard to do, and I am told they have no yet been done; and physics moves on.
I joined the computer software company Logica in 1975, and started off building big simulations. I designed a relational database management system, Rapport, which we sold successfully for several years (winning an ICP $5M award).Then Oracle came out, which was much better. In 1984 I moved up to our research centre at Cambridge, and learnt about AI. I ran a project to build a medical expert system, for Electromyography, and published a bit ('Cooperative expert systems' ECAI 1986).
I managed Logica's Cambridge research centre from 1986 for four years; during that time we built expert systems, neural nets, advanced user interfaces, and speech/language interfaces; we did object orientation and mathematical specification, and dabbled in VLSI.
This year I left Logica to join Charteris, a small consultancy based in London. There are currently 12 of us, and we help clients get the most out of information technology. As business people start to realise the potential of IT to completely change their businesses, and as the web changes things, it is a good time to be doing this.
Recent publications in cognitive science have all been in my spare time. The main problem is that I do not get to meet professional scientists very often, to present the ideas face-to-face, or to get feedback. Also Charteris is keeping me very busy, so there is not much timeto do this.
I married Sue on 1972, although we are now divorced. We have two sons, Tim (23) - got a 1st at Cambridge, now studying law at Nottingham, and Ben (17) at Uppingham school, who beats me at golf.
Jan Collie and I got married this spring, on an amazingly sunny day. Jan is an author and journalist and musician and a lot else. She has two children, Alice(14) and Matthew (8). We are sorting out a house in the Cambridge area, very slowly. I can't dance, but Jan is going to teach me some day.
The picture shows Alice, Tim, me, Matthew, Jan and Ben.