I was born in 1959 and brought up in Gloucestershire, England. I now live in the North of Scotland. My postal address is:
21e Balnakeil
1977-80 Cambridge University: Mathematics Degree, First Class
1980-81 Warwick University: MSc in Pure Mathematics
1981-83 Warwick University: PhD in Group Theory
1983-present Durness: Self-employed artist (landscapes and seascapes). I have a gallery attached to my house. Full-time until 1991, and has waxed and mostly waned since then.
1991-1997 Durness: Self-employed computer programmer. I became interested in AI and Machine Vision around 1986 and bought a computer (Acorn Archimedes A440) in 1989. I taught myself programming, first in Basic and assembler, then C. I started writing commercial programs for Acorn RISC OS machines in 1991. I wrote Hard Disc Companion (version 2.0), Desktop Thesaurus, FairIsle, and the text OCR program Sleuth (all versions). FairIsle was distributed by iSV Products, the others by Beebug; all were written in C.
1996-2006 Durness: Self-employed computer programmer. I started work on the music OCR program SharpEye in 1996. I released the first version of SharpEye in 1999, with improved versions following in later years. SharpEye is recognised as one of the most accurate music OCR programs in the world. Two large-scale academic studies put SharpEye ahead of the competition (see refs below). I transferred rights in SharpEye to another company in 2006.
2007-present Durness: Started learning about biology, bioninformatics and computational biology, and doing some original research. My current interests are in phylogenetic analysis and macroevolution. I have mostly used C++ and R for this work.
The Influence of Nilpotent Subgroups on the Nilpotent Length and Derived Length of a Finite Group , Proc. London Math Soc. (3), 49 (1984) 343-360.
(with Trevor Hawkes) On the Structure of a Group Whose Orbits on a finite Module Are the Orbits of a proper Subgroup , Journal of Algebra, 84 (1985).
Image Segmentation using Texture Boundary Detection, Pattern Recognition Letters, 15 (1994) 533-541.
Various short articles in CVu, CAUGers, and Overload published by The Association of C and C++ Users (1993-98).
Book Chapter (with Bee Ong, Ivan Bruno, and Kia Ng) Optical Music Imaging: Music Document Digitisation, Recognition, Evaluation, and Restoration (2008) DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-150-6.ch004.
Tree Models for Macro-Evolution and Phylogenetic Analysis Systematic Biology (in press).
Calculations for multi-type age-dependent binary branching processes. Journal of Mathematical Biology, 2010, DOI: 10.1007/s00285-010-0362-8.
D. Byrd, Prospects for Improving OMR with Multiple Recognizers, ISMIR 2006, 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval.
K.C. Ng, J. Barthelmy, B. Ong, I. Bruno, and P. Nesi, (2005). CIMS: Coding Images of Music Sheets, version 3.4. Interactive MusicNetwork working paper, 2005.