Hamish Cunningham Professor of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK |
sheffield.ac.uk/dcs/people/academic/hcunningham
Hi, I'm Hamish and I'm so old I can even remember the original home pages of
the World Wide Web!
Forty-odd years ago I took a course in Computer Models of Mind at Sussex University, and one way or another I've been working on Artificial Intelligence, computing with human language and Information Retrieval ever since. I have been:
- a founder member of Sheffield's GATE project — gate.ac.uk — and of the scientific board of the IR Facility — ir-facility.org — and of the executive board of the Institute for Sustainable Food
- originator of the MoPi Raspberry Pi mobile power add-on — pi.gate.ac.uk
- an open source software developer, author of a couple of hundred scientific papers, several books, and principal investigator on several dozen research projects
These days I am:
- building zero cloud AI for privacy-preserving smart home voice control
- teaching third year undergraduates about the Internet of Things — iot.unphone.net
- bringing a novel open IoT device — unphone.net — to market — shop.pimoroni.com/products/unphone
- still mad about aquaponics
I used to hope that as time passed I would get older and wiser, but it seems that in fact I just get odder and wider. I believe that open source technology has a contribution to make to sustainability and resilience, and that political democracy is proving incapable of saving the environment due to our complete lack of economic democracy. If it isn't economically viable to save our planet, it can't be the planet that is wrong!