Having completed an undergraduate degree in chemistry, I then shifted my academic allegiance and completed a PhD (Leeds) which explored cooperative reasoning in distributed blackboard systems. I joined the University of Aberdeen as a postdoc in 1988, before moving into an academic position as a lecturer in 1991. I was promoted to senior lecturer in 2002 and professor in 2009.

My research interests focus on distributed intelligent systems, specifically autonomous software agents and the semantic web. Current work focuses on the role of provenance in a digital society, including how to represent provenance (of activities, entities and agents online); provenance and social computation; provenance, trust and open data; and employing provenance to drive information quality assessments.

I'm currently Director of the UK Research Councils' Digital Economy Hub 'dot.rural' and UK lead on the 'TRUMP' UK-India consortium; between 2006 and 2012 I was Director of the 'PolicyGrid' Digital Social Research Node, funded by the UK Economic & Social Research Council. In the past I have held various management positions including Head of Computing Science, Head of the College of Physical Sciences Graduate School, Head of the Northern Research Partnership Graduate School - but I think I am better now...

Q: Why the dry stone walls?

A: We own a farmhouse and approx 7 acres north of Aberdeen, so there is always lots to do...