Director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and holds the Personal Chair of Knowledge-Based Systems at the University of Edinburgh. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland's National Academy), Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI, Fellow of the British Computer Society, Senior Visiting Research Scientist at the Institute of Human Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Florida, and on the editorial board of a number of AI journals. His research background involves advanced knowledge and planning technologies, with a focus on their use in emergency response and collaborative systems especially using virtual worlds. He is the Coordinator for the Virtual University of Edinburgh (Vue) and Coordinator for Distance Education in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.