I gained my Ph.D. from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds, where I was supervised
by Dr Timothy Potts. The title of my thesis was The Logic of Aspect: An Inquiry into the Semantic Structure
of Ordinary Temporal Discourse. In it I extended the Tense Logic formalism of Arthur Prior to provide an
account of aspectual phenomena in language. This required the introduction of a far-reaching distinction
between states and events, which was incorporated into the formalism. After gaining my PhD I revised
my thesis for publication; it was published in 1984 by Oxford University Press under the title The Logic of
Aspect: An Axiomatic Approach.
I was appointed to a research fellowship in Philosophy at Leeds in 1985. There I continued working
on temporal logic formalisms, but now with a focus on potential applications in the area of Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence. While there, I organised a conference on Temporal Logics and their
Applications, which brought together both Computer Scientists and Philosophers for a fruitful two-day
meeting. A collection of papers from the conference, under my editorship, was published by Academic
Press in 1987.
I was appointed to a lectureship in Computer Science at Exeter in 1987. Since then my research has
largely been of an interdisciplinary nature, encompassing elements of Computer Science, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Mathematics, and Geography. I have worked on Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, Logics for Temporal and Spatial Reasoning, Spatial and Temporal Ontologies, Geographical
Information Science, and the Philosophy of Computation Besides my conference and journal publications
in these areas, I have published a book, Qualitative Spatial Change (OUP, 2000) which covers many of the
topics, computational, mathematical, and philosophical, which I have explored in my research.
My research on temporal reasoning in AI has been influential in the field, most particularly with regard
to the question of how to choose the most appropriate formalism for a particular application (e.g., whether
to use instants or intervals, reified or unreified formulae, first-order or modal temporal logic). In the spatial
area, my work has particularly addressed two issues which are recognised as being of major importance for
the future development of spatial information systems, namely the integration of object-based and fieldbased representations, and the proper handling of the temporal dimension. My work in these areas has been
frequently cited as highly innovative
