I spent my formative years at Bishopbriggs High School and went on from there to gain a BSc(Hons) in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy (Physics) from Glasgow University (1978-1982). After university I joined ICL, a large British computer manufacturer where I began my computing career by programming device drivers for the PERQ workstation at Dalkeith Palace.
I have worked in both academic (Edinburgh in the Artifical Intelligence department, where the systems programing group I was a member of became the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, and Heriot-Watt University in the then Scottish HCI Centre, later merged into the Computing and Electrical Engineering Department) and industrial environments (OWL, or Office Workstations Limited) on both research and commercial hypertext and human computer interaction projects. In particular I was involved with the development of the Guide product for PC's and Macintosh - released in 1986, and discontinued on June 30, 2000.
I joined CWI at the beginning of 1992 when the Multimedia and Human Computer Interaction group was headed by Dick Bulterman. The group concentrated on authoring software for hypermedia presentations (both implementations and theoretical models) and on operating system and network support for multimedia and hypermedia, in particular synchronization of independent streams. I took over the group at the beginning of 1999, when Dick left CWI, along with Jack Jansen and Sjoerd Mullender, to start up Oratrix.
Een leuk artikel over de werk in mijn proefschrift is te vinden bij de UvALink.
An article about my becoming a professor at the Technical University of Eindhoven appeared in the October 2001 edition of Cursor.
I am one of the contributors to the World Wide Web Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) 1.0 recommendation.