Professor Alan Dix

Technical Director

Education: D.Phil. (University of York) Dip. Mathematical Statistics (University of Cambridge) BA(Hons.) (University of Cambridge)

I have long hair, a beard and am the son of a carpenter. Thereafter all pretensions to saintliness end.

I began as a bearded mathematician at Cambridge, worked as a research scientist at the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering (lots of brightly painted tractors), a Cobol programmer for Cumbria County Council (lots of beige and brown ICL mainframes), then in 1984, thanks to Alvey, I became a bearded computer scientist. I worked for almost 10 years at York University before moving to become a Reader at Huddersfield in 1994, where I lead the HCI Research centre hci@hud, and chaired the HCI95 conference. I was Associate Dean of the School of Computing at Staffordshire University (lots of meetings) and am still part-time Professor of Computing there. I have written and edited several books (see my web pages), including a big textbook on Human-Computer Interaction and a smaller textbook on Artificial Intelligence.

In general I'm interested in just about anything, especially the joints in wooden tables and why the stacking chairs in my office don't stack. I am married to Fiona with two daughters and two dogs.

Look here for Charm the Quantum Dog, the Physicians of Myddfai etc.