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Last updated 10th March 2023

I returned to study as a mature student in 1996 when I started a degree in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Bradford. After graduating with a first class honours in 1999, I started a PhD programme in approximation theory in the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of Huddersfield, under the direction of Professor John Mason.

The research for my PhD thesis mainly concentrated on the reconstruction of smooth surfaces, from noisy scattered data using radial basis function models. The title of my thesis was "Radial Basis and Support Vector Machine Algorithms for Approximating Discrete Data.” The problems that I studied included randomly scattered, structured and semi-structured data approximation, support vector machines with radial kernels (for mixed noise distributions) and detecting and approximating fault lines using discrete Gaussian curvature and locally constructed thin plate spline interpolants.

I completed my PhD in 2002 and after spending three years as a research fellow became a full time senior lecturer.  In 2011 I became the Subject Area Leader for Computing and Information Systems in the Informatics Department and was Acting Head of Department of Informatics from June 2015 until January 2017. In May 2017 I became Associate Dean (T&L).

My research falls broadly into the area of Artificial Intelligence.  I am particularly interested in machine learning techniques - in particular I am interested in the use of various loss functions used in support vector machines for the treatment of noisy data (using novel approximation estimators to mitigate the effects of outlier bias).  I also research other supervised and unsupervised learning techniques which includes artificial neural networks (in particular radial basis function networks), clustering techniques, data reduction and data classification.  I also work with colleagues on problems concerned with automated planning, such as knowledge extraction, knowledge representation and automated planning for optimal multi-process control.