ARTICLES, PAPERS AND TALKS

I have been exceptionally lucky in my career. I received an excellent education from the University of Leeds. I was lucky enough to work for Apple for four critical years. I have worked at six startups - each a unique and fascinating experience. I spent four years at Google.

I have written a number of articles about computer science

Patents

I have distinctly mixed feelings about software patents. Many egregiously bad patents have been granted and patent trolls are a real threat to innovation. On the other hand, there are also ideas worth protecting. I won't judge which categories the following ideas fall into, but when you work at large companies like Apple and Google, you often end up with patents. Here are some of mine:

  • QuickTime Player (Apple) I led the engineering team that built Apple's first "brushed metal" application. This was the application that started Apple's "skeuomorphism" cult. The team, including Steve Jobs, were awarded three patents for the user interface: media playback timeline,
  • SmartMatch (Guru/Unicru)An intelligent search engine that was able to match job candidates to jobs, using a hybrid of ontologies and machine learning.
  • Squared (Google)Google's first semantic search engine - it extracted hundreds of millions of objects and their attribues from the web and was able to do attribute search across them.
  • Blueprint (Google)A proposal to build an easy to use database system with a HyperCard-like user interface