I proposed and created a prototype of a novel linguistic search and retrieval platform for lawyers. LARC was a web environment for interrogating the language used in English case law reports and legislation. It helps to elucidate meaning, nuance and linguistic variation in judicial opinion and legislative output. The work involved building the first formal corpus of English case law reports which comprised over one billion words of legal language. The platform applied techniques and algorithms from the domain of corpus linguistics.
Studied law to undergraduate degree level and specialised in my final year on information technology law. This encompasses data protection, privacy and security, database rights, copyright and intellectual property.
Managing software development teams and teams of transcribers for the delivery of online software platforms and large-scale digitisation projects of public records including collections of newspaper articles, censuses and comparable population surveys.
Database design, development and replication for large-scale data driven projects. Particularly skilled in PostgreSQL, MySQL and Persona variants to accommodate collections of millions of records.
Programming and software development skills at an advanced level across a range of platforms and technologies. Particularly strong in Ruby, Ruby On Rails, Typescript, Python. Strong grasp of associated technologies including SQL, CSS, XML, JSON, CGI.
Applying the outcomes of academic and commercial research to software development in domains such as similarity ranking, disambiguation of result sets and preservation of duplicates and essential duplicates.
Market research and opportunity identification for client projects and new product development. Excellent background knowledge of current trends and activities in my areas of interest and an ability to quickly assimilate, understand and summarise knowledge from novel areas.
Specialise in authoring feasibility studies, technology roadmaps and market briefings for key clients across a variety of markets and at all levels. I have knowledge in delivering for and to board level across a variety of technology sectors.
Technical project management and feasibility research. Well versed in market-led product development methodologies and software development management techniques, particularly Agile and Scrum. Have a successful track record in delivering large-scale software and web development projects for clients including the National Archives at Kew, Education Scotland, LearnDirect Scotland, the BBC, the Department of Trade and Industry and the Scottish Government.
User-centred design and technology development capabilities have been central to many projects. These ensure that complex technical systems are presented to the target audience in a manner that they can accept, adopt and use productively. Work for my PhD with focus groups of lawyers, The Open University, Learning and Teaching Scotland particularly relevant here.
Implementing, customising and working with major text engines and Natural Language Processing products including Apache Lucene, NLTK/Scikit Engine. Familiar with a broad range of corpus preparation tools and information augmentation software – lemmatisers, part of speech taggers, entity extraction systems, sentiment analyst techniques.
Cloud and UNIX/Linux server deployment, administration and maintenance on a commercial high-availability basis for major clients and projects. I have managed and maintained both dedicated hardware and cloud systems on GCP, GKE, Heroku, AWS and DigitalOcean. Extensive knowledge of parallel computing infrastructures using messaging protocols like AMQP through RabbitMQ. Also memory tuning, debugging and leak detection using Valgrind, gdb and native Linux tools.
Written and oral communication and presentation skills are a significant strength. Delivered presentations at academic conferences, seminars and commercial events. I am comfortable in developing work and presenting results and feasibility studies to board level. I have run sessions and presented at exhibitions including SOTT, BETT and London Online.
Image analysis and transcription correction systems for large document collections and particularly for more recent censuses and other public records where people reported may still be living.
Readability classification and the application of statistical Natural Language Processing techniques to the automatic determination of the topic of documents and text segments without recourse to subjective metadata.
Replacing and augmenting Keyword In Context (KWIC) textual information result sets with visual and other alternatives which can provide a greater degree of insight for the user of a search and retrieval system.
The role and implications of probability-based scoring methods in large-scale corpus investigation with text mining tools. Removing probability and chance from ranking algorithms by improving access to very large and balanced corpora.
Image feature extraction and analysis for the search and retrieval of images based upon the content of the image itself. Focusing on the identification of salient and robust 'features' in individual images which can then be matched to in and measured against features from query images.
Automatic disambiguation and summarisation techniques using similarity (or difference) scoring and ranking methods with intelligent result filtration.
Launched the Phrasebox information mining application during a lecture by Professor John McHHardy Sinclair at the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference in Montreal, June 2006. Provided technical support during the presentation to approximately one thousand delegates and assisted Professor Sinclair in developing his talk with reference to the Phrasebox application.
Knowledge Transfer Programme with Edinburgh Napier University and Canan Ltd declared the best such programme in Scotland for that iteration in November 2004. Programme was further recognised as one of the top eight such ventures in the United Kingdom in the same year and an award was presented to all parties for this achievement at the Department of Trade and Industry in London.
Appointed as an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Computing at the University of St Andrews after graduating with my PhD in Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction.
Graduated with distinction from the MSc Computing programme at Liverpool John Moores University.
Development of several prototype iterations of visual search and retrieval tools for the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University. These releases were well received and I was asked to produce a fully featured demonstration system which is based upon this work for exposure to end users within the staff and student bodies at the university.
Won a number of awards for creative writing, including: the Scotsman Newspaper's First Poetry Award 1991; WH Smith Young Writers' Competition 1989, 1990, 1991, 1994; Welsh Arts Council Poetry Award 1992; Neil Gunn Writing Competition Runner-up 1997; Cadbury's Writing Competition Runner-up 1993, 1998.
Poetry and short stories published in a number of books and newspapers, including the July Fool series (Macmillan, various years), The Scotsman and The West Highland Free Press. Poetry has also been read on BBC Radio.
Managed and assisted in the production of OpenOffice.org in Scottish Gaelic which remains (as part of the LibreOffice fork) the only large software package currently available and under development for this language.
Ph.D Thesis.
Brown, E., Murray-Rust, D., Cojocaru, G. and Brown, C.
Little, S., Brown, E. and Rueger, S. Book chapter on Content Based Image Retrieval and Image feature extraction.
Brown, E.
Henderson, J. and Brown, E. and Mitchell, C.
Brown, E.
Buchanan, W. and Brown, E.
Brown, E. and Buchanan, W. (poster presentation with question and answer session).
Concerning the release of a version of OpenOffice.org in Scottish Gaelic, the first major software title to be made available in that language. Ryfield, B. Linux.com and widely syndicated online. (July 5th, 2005).
Concerning the success of the KTP Partnership between Edinburgh Napier University and Cànan Ltd. Edinburgh Evening News. (20th April 2004).
Two plenary sessions and hand-outs from session presentation, Society for Scr