I am a lecturer in Human Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London, and a member of the Interaction, Media and Communication research group. My main interest is in the computational semantics and pragmatics of dialogue - using the context of a conversation to build models of what people are actually talking about.

This semester (Jan-Mar 2010) I am teaching Interaction Design (DCS318/AMCM318). Lectures are 10-12am on Fridays, lab sessions 4-6pm on Mondays (see here for my office surgery hours). Materials for the course are available here. There's also a course twitter account to follow for announcements.

In 2010 I will be co-chair for the 14th SemDial workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue, to be held in June in Poznań, Poland. This year we're calling it PozDial. In 2009 I was the local organiser for the SIGDIAL 2009 conference on discourse and dialogue, which we hosted here at QMUL.

Before arriving at QMUL in 2009, I worked in the Computational Semantics Lab at CSLI, Stanford, on projects building an automatic meeting-understanding system and a conversational dialogue system for cars. Prior to that I did my PhD at King's College London, looking at clarificational dialogue and what it means for dialogue systems. And before any of this academic stuff, I worked as an engineer in the field of active noise & vibration control, mostly with Ultra Electronics and Noise Cancellation Technologies.

During 2008, I spent a year travelling around Europe, Turkey, North and West Africa with my wife (a professional chef) to learn all about food and its traditions. You can read all about it here.