ian watson

about me

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

I graduated from Essex University and returned to take an M.Sc. in Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems in the Department of Computer Science. After obtaining my M.Sc. I went to live in New York for a year and then returned to the UK to study for a Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science at Liverpool University. In collaboration with the Knowledge Engineering Group at Unilever Research I developed a knowledge analysis methodology that supports Sowa's conceptual graphs.

After my PhD I started work at the University of Salford iand was a Lecturer, Senior Lecture and briefly promoted to Reader in Computer Science. Whilst there I developed an expert system called EMMY to predict the cost of housing maintenance for Housing Associations. This system has subsequently gone on to be sold commercially by Engineering Technology Ltd. I was also involved in the development of the Client Centred Approach. This is a development methodology for expert systems that supports rapid prototyping within the Waterfall model.

From my first hand experience of the difficulty of developing knowledge-based expert systems I became interested in Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) and am now one of the world's most active researchers in this discipline running AI-CBR the Internet site for CBR.

In recent years I have become interested in AI on the web and have recently worked with an Australian firm to implement a CBR system on the web. A paper describing this project won the "Distinguished Paper Award" at IJCAI-99. I have also worked for the UK government's Cabinet Office on the development of the INFOSHOP a web-based information support system for local government.

I am currently a co-chair of the CBR track of FLAIRS 08.

last updated 15/10/2007