Primary Job Title Founder Primary Organization Flexpansion
Gender Male
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Tim has spent much of the past two decades in teaching, study and research in Computational Linguistics, interspersed with some sales and marketing. His doctoral research at the world-famous School of Informatics at Edinburgh University was on the methods people employed in abbreviation, in order to inform a system for automatic abbreviation
expansion. This was initially aimed at computer users with motor disabilities which slow their typing, to enable them to type more text with less effort, and express themselves more fully. He then realised that the technology also had a much wider application in the massively growing market for mobile devices – since everyone’s input is hindered by their small keyboards.
He holds a BA in Linguistics & Phonetics (Leeds University), plus an MSc in Cognitive Science & Natural Language, and PhD in Informatics, both at Edinburgh. He was a Research Assistant at Leeds, and Lancaster University, building and annotating large databases (‘corpora’) of English language in high detail, including semantic, grammatical and case structural information.
Tim has experience in project and team management, and has worked in sales for a web design company in Cumbria. He also dealt with the correspondence and merchandise for the band Utah Saints in the 1990′s (still going strong :-), which produced some great anecdotes.
Tim enjoys white-water kayaking (‘terrifying but exhilarating’), climbing and snowsports. He has also done a couple of stand-up comedy routines in front of audiences of a hundred (‘just terrifying’).
