Jocelyn Ireson-Paine

Oxford University Department of Experime

http://www.j-paine.org/#artificial_intelligence

Between 1984 and 1998, I taught Artificial Intelligence and Prolog to undergraduates at the Oxford University Department of Experimental Psychology. This included marking and correcting essays, giving tutorials and lectures, writing all the course notes, and designing example programs to accompany them. In 1996, I was an Assessor for the AI option on the Psychology Finals paper.

skills used: Prolog, Content Writing, Editing, Proofreading

London Economics

In a series of projects spanning 1986 to 1990, I wrote technical manuals for London Economics. Most of these described how to use software for pricing electricity contracts, a hot topic at the time because of the utility privatisations. I also tested software, and updated the screen interfaces to these programs, using Modula and Turbo Pascal.
skills used: Content Writing, Editing, Proofreading

Expert Systems Ltd

Between 1986 and 1988, I implemented Prolog compilers and expert systems for Expert Systems Ltd of Oxford. I also wrote their documentation.
skills used: Prolog, Content Writing, Editing, Proofreading

Institute for Fiscal Studies

Between 1986 and 1989, I did a lot of general-purpose programming for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Much of this involved coding data-conversion programs in Pascal, Modula, Cobol, and Algol68. In one big project that spanned several years, I converted old magnetic tapes holding data on the spending patterns of British households, the so-called Family Expenditure Survey. Without this, the Institute for Fiscal Studies would no longer exist, as most of its economic models at the time needed the FES data. I did some of this conversion using a syntax-directed translator that I coded in Algol68. This read specifications of the input and output data formats, then generated an automaton that checked the input, converted the data, and reported errors.
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BICC

http://www.j-paine.org/morphgen/morphgen.html

In 1991, I designed and coded a "morphological generator" for BICC. This is a program that inflects English words given their roots and grammatical class. The generator was intended for an "intelligent word processor", intended to correct grammatical mistakes. I coded it in Lisp, as an extension to the Alvey Natural Language Toolkit. I had to analyse English linguistics in order to work out how to represent the task of inflecting words, and also had to reverse-engineer the existing Toolkit code so that I could extend it correctly.

skills used: Lisp

J.B.

In 1991, I spent several months reporting on developments in office automation, computing, and electronics. I wrote these reports for "J.B.", a private consultancy. J.B. sold them to consultants in office automation, computing, and electronics who wanted to know about innovations. I had free choice of topics to report on: these included developments in robotics (e.g. robot aides for paraplegics; guided robots for warehousing), neural networks, document recognition and classification, agents (in the Artificial Intelligence sense), and microfabrication. I visited various libraries in order to find current journals, including the university libraries in Oxford and the British Library in London.

skills used: Content Writing, Editing, Proofreading

Expert Systems BV

In 1992, I visited Zeist in the Netherlands to teach Prolog and expert systems to customers of Expert Systems BV. I designed and wrote the course notes, and coded example programs to accompany them.

skills used: Prolog, Editing, Proofreading, Lisp

Pfizer

Between 1992 and 1993, I consulted for Pfizer, reporting on ways in which Artificial Intelligence could speed up drug discovery. I then found AI experts and set up collaborations between them and Pfizer. Topics covered included machine learning, analogical reasoning, inductive logic programming, and inverse kinematics. My reports explained drug discovery to computer scientists who didn't know it, and AI to pharmacologists who didn't know that.
skills used: Content Writing, Editing, Proofreading

London Economics

In 1993, I worked in London testing programs for London Economics. These helped water companies forecast the amount of extra water they would need to supply as population grew
skills used: VBA Excel

Expert Systems International, Athens

At various times between 1993 and 1996, I visited Athens to work on Artificial Intelligence and document manipulation for Expert Systems International. One project, which required me to learn about SGML, was a system for building new documents from parts of old ones, and for tracking the location of paper copies of these. I prototyped the first versions in Prolog, and later ones in Lisp called from Java.
skills used: Prolog, Lisp

Purple Internet Productions

In 1995, I spent a few days at a London computer show demonstrating email and the Web to prospective Internet users for Purple Internet Productions.
skills used:

Institute for Fiscal Studies

http://www.j-paine.org/wom/orexx/orexx.html

In 1995, we realised at the Institute for Fiscal Studies that we could connect our economic models to the Web, making them much more widely available. I've already mentioned some of the projects that resulted from this, but the first was a series of prototypes we worked on in 1995 and 1996. I coded the first of these using standard CGI techniques in Rexx under the GoServe server on OS/2. Later, more complicated prototypes, I coded using a system called Web-O-Matic that I'd designed. This is described in the paper linked from here, and enables one to specify interactive pages by writing HTML-like tags that it compiles to Java instances.
skills used: Content Writing, Editing, Proofreading, CGI, Html

Aquinas Tutoring

In 1995, I taught computer science to A-level students for Aquinas Tutoring. Some students were highly anxious because their parents were pushing them so hard to succeed. I had to find ways to reduce their anxiety, while teaching the subject in suitably small steps.
skills used: Content Writing

Oxford GlycoScience

In 1997, I wrote reports about proteomics and proteome analysis for Oxford GlycoScience. These are topics in applied biochemistry. My reports explained them to computer scientists who did not know biochemistry, but with whom the company needed to work in order to install machine-learning software.
skills used: Content Writing, Editing, Proofreading

L'Observatoire Européen du Textile et d

In 1998, I visited Brussels and repaired a damaged Web site for L'Observatoire Européen du Textile et de l'Habillement, an organisation which reports on the textile industry for the EU. This was a quick two-day visit, during which I had to search a file system for copies of the pages, make them consistent, and put them in their intended place on the server.
skills used: Editing, Proofreading, Html

BBC and Institute for Fiscal Studies

http://www.virtual-worlds.biz/history/

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has provided the BBC with Budget advice and analysis for many years. In 1995, I and my colleagues Graham Stark, Keith Church and Andy Beharrell transformed this service by writing the original versions of Be Your Own Chancellor and Ready Reckoner. Be Your Own Chancellor was a smaller relative of the Virtual Economy program mentioned earlier in my portfolio, while Ready Reckoner calculated income and tax for a single person or family before and after the Budget.

We built Ready Reckoner specially for the BBC Budget Day programme and had it running by 6pm on the day. As enthusiasts for a new and exciting way to disseminate e-learning programs to users anywhere in the world, we were featured in the Financial Times, the Times, and many other papers.

In 1998, BBC News Online began funding us to implement the interactive Budget coverage on their own servers. Be Your Own Chancellor was usually released a few days before the Budget, while Ready Reckoner had to be running within half a hour after the Budget speech (we managed it within 5 minutes one time), and has at times been the single most popular item on BBC News Online. At its peak, it was being run several thousand times every second.

My duties varied from year to year, but always included porting the models to the BBC's Web servers, updating the HTML forms to reflect new economic variables after the Chancellor's speech, and a good deal of other programming, interfacing, and testing.
skills used: Content Writing, Editing, Proofreading, CGI, Javascript, Html

Bristol University and the Institute for

http://www.bized.co.uk/virtual/economy/index.htm

In 1998 and 1999, my colleagues Graham Stark, Keith Church and Andy Beharell implemented Virtual Economy: a Web-based system of the British economy. This was in collaboration with Bristol University's Institute for Learning and Research Technology and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Using an HTML form, users could change tax rates and other economic variables, then submit these to VE's server and get back an economic forecast for the next ten years. VE was intended for teaching economics, and funded by the Nuffield Foundation. My job included writing Java to display graphs and tables, as well as routines to call existing economic models from the Java and pass data to and from them.
skills used: Editing, Proofreading, CGI, Html

Research for Today

http://www.sharesim.arachsys.com/login/servicedemo.jsp

This is a big system written for the market-research company Research for Today. I started writing it in 1999, and still maintain and improve it. It implements numerous Web-based programs for analysing market-research data, coded in Java and JSP to Research for Today's specification. I also designed a "questionnaire compiler", which allows the user to specify Web-based questionnaires in a textual questionnaire-description language. The compiler converts these into interactive questionnaires on the Web. Research for Today provided the algorithms for data analysis, but it was my job to convert them to Java. All design of the questionnaire compiler was mine.

skills used: Content Writing, Editing, Proofreading, CGI, Javascript, Dhtml, Html

Departamento de Informática, Universida

http://www.j-paine.org/visit_report.html

In 1998 and 2000, I was invited to the Department of Informatics at the University of Minho. The visits were funded by a grant from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, and enabled me to carry out a few weeks' research into algebraic Web processing and machine learning. The former is a mathematical way of describing the structure of Web pages.
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Departamento de Economia da Escola de Ec

In 1998, and again in 2000, the department of economics at the University of Minho in Braga asked me to implement interactive Web pages by which visitors to the department's Web site could search for staff and students. I coded this in Access and ASP. I needed to know enough Portuguese to read existing Web pages and related documents.
skills used: Content Writing, Editing, Proofreading, CGI, Html

Institute for Learning and Research, Bri

http://www.bized.co.uk/virtual/vla/theories/spreadsheets_background.htm

Between 2001 and 2003, my colleagues Graham Stark, Keith Church, Andy Beharrell and I put a range of economic models onto the Web for the Bristol University Institute for Learning and Research Technology's Virtual Learning Arcade. Many of these were written in Excel, and I wrote a spreadsheet interpreter to read Excel files, carry out the calculations, and return results to the user's browser. This was part of my Model Master spreadsheet-analysis program, which became the tool I now call Excelsior. Another part of this tool automatically converted spreadsheets submitted by the user to interactive Web pages.
skills used: Editing, Proofreading, CGI, Html, VBA Excel, Lisp

United Nations

http://www.virtual-worlds.biz/demonstrations/darts/

In 2004, I and my colleague Graham Stark developed a Web-based model of the Russian economy for the United Nations "Wider" University. My responsibilities included writing PHP scripts, testing them, and internationalising the system so that it could display errors and accept input in Russian (using Cyrillic) as well as English.

skills used: Editing, Proofreading, CGI, Javascript, Html

Dobbs Code Talk

http://www.j-paine.org/ainewsletter/index.html

Between October 2004 and July 2006, I wrote a monthly newsletter about Artificial Intelligence for Dobbs Code Talk. This included reviews and explanations of scientific papers, AI jokes, reviews of science fiction, and tutorials on how to write or use various AI programs. I had a completely free hand in choosing topics and deciding what and how much to write.
skills used: Prolog, Content Writing, Editing, CGI, Html, Lisp

Weedon Grant

http://www.j-paine.org/#safe_spreadsheets_fast_with_excelsior

Between 2005 and the end of 2007, for Weedon Grant, I prototyped spreadsheets for forecasting the finances of social-housing and urban-regeneration organisations. I coded the spreadsheets in a language called Excelsior that I developed, that enables one to write formulae using meaningful names rather than A1-style cell addresses. My Excelsior compiler then translated this to Excel. In order to understand about social housing, I had to reverse-engineer existing spreadsheets, which I did using a reverse-engineering Excelsior tool that I also developed. This translates spreadsheets into Excelsior, replacing cell addresses by meaningful names, and thereby makes them easier to understand. All the design and implementation of Excelsior was mine.
skills used: Prolog, Content Writing, VBA Excel

Spoton

In November 2007, and at the start of 2008, I repaired and updated a Web server written in Lisp for the Spoton Corporation of Torquay, a Web hosting and design company. In order to do this, I had to test the server under the CMUCL, Allegro, and SBCL Lisp implementations, running on the Parallels Virtual Machine as well as natively.
skills used: CGI, Javascript, Html, Lisp

Dobbs Code Talk

http://www.j-paine.org/dobbs/autosalesman.html

Between March 2008 and March 2011, I wrote regular columns for the Dobbs Code Talk blog. These included humorous features on programming, as well as serious articles in which I explained, for example, how to use the Snobol language, and how Prolog works. I also drew cartoons and wrote about science fiction.
skills used: Content Writing, Editing, CGI, Html

Myself

http://www.j-paine.org/cgi-bin/webcats/webcats.php

In this project, started in August 2008, I built a Web-based system for demonstrating concepts in a branch of maths called category theory. I wrote a program in SWI-Prolog that represented the necessary mathematical concepts (so-called "colimits", "equalisers", etc.), generated examples of them, and displayed them as graphs (in VRML and as GIFs) and text. To make the graphs, my code called the free GraphViz plotter. I then wrote PHP scripts to take input from an HTML form telling the system which concepts to display, and to invoke the Prolog appropriately. All the design and implementation was mine.
skills used: Prolog, Content Writing, Editing, CGI, Html

The Office of the Scottish Charities Reg

In this project, carried out in 2008 for the Office of the Scottish Charities Regulator, my colleague Graham Stark and I built a Web-based system for helping those regulating the Scottish national charities. It estimated the number of people who could afford to use the services offered by an organisation that had applied to become a charity. The regulators needed this because you can only become a charity if enough of the population can afford your services. Graham built the system in Gnat Ada, using the Ada AWS Web server library. I ported it to Windows, and also tested the system.
skills used: Editing, Proofreading, CGI, Html

The Oxford Pain Research Group

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2474/11/150/abstract/

The Oxford Pain Research Group looks into ways of decreasing the pain resulting from various illnesses. One of these is fibromyalgia. I have taken part in various research grants, analysing data about the effect of drugs on fibromyalgia. I wrote programs in R and Java, using Andrew Khan's Java Excel API library. These extracted data from drug-trial spreadsheets sent by Pfizer and others, and summarised it in ways meaningful to doctors. The medical researchers on the team told me which kinds of analysis they wanted, but I was solely responsible for designing the analysis and plotting algorithms.
skills used: CGI, Html, VBA Excel

iOpener

iOpener is an Oxford company that runs surveys on the happiness of employees. In 2009 and 2010, I designed and coded updates to a Java program that generated reports about employees' psychological state, given the raw results of these surveys. My updates made the generated reports match the tricky layout and colours prescribed by a new graphic designer, and also plotted survey summaries on unusual pentagonal graphs. The reports were PDFs, for which I used Bruno Lowagie's iText library.
skills used: Content Writing, CGI, Javascript, Html

EASA

I have consulted, and still am consulting, for EASA on VBA and Excel. Projects have included running Excel and calling its object model from Java, trapping errors thrown by VBA, calculating Excel cell-dependency graphs, and coding Excel add-ins.
skills used: CGI, Html, VBA Excel

The International Baccalaureate Organisa

In 2010, I designed and coded an Excel spreadsheet for the International Baccalaureate Organisation in New York. The spreadsheet was for people teaching the International Baccalaureate to record their students' marks. It contained a database of course topics and subtopics, and I coded VBA macros that could create sheets customised for a particular teacher's choice of these. In all, I coded 4,000 lines of VBA, ranging from utility functions that converted between variants and cell ranges, to random number generators for test data, a mark-validator, and routines for generating charts. Because the International Baccalaureate team didn't know exactly what they needed when we started, I used a form of "extreme programming" whereby I divided the project into a series of very small steps. Each step was about two days' of programming, and resulted in a slight improvement on the previous step's spreadsheet, which I could show to the IB people and get immediate feedback on. In this way, I proceeded in 17 steps from an initial non-working mockup which we used to refine colours and layout, to a complete spreadsheet.
skills used: VBA Excel