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I then went straight on to do an MSc in Evolutionary & Adaptive Systems at
Sussex University. After this I realised that I needed a break from academia
and moved into industry. I spent four years in industry actively pursuing a
career in Research & Development (R & D). I then decided that it was
time to return to academia to follow my dream of working in blue-sky
research.
Even though blue-sky research may never be used in the real
world without re-implementation, I am a firm believer that software written
purely for research can still benefit from being implemented with
strong software engineering principles in mind. The whole point of
research is to find out something that you do not already know.
You do not neccessarily know what will and will not work. This
means that what you need to implement can rapidly change.
The more complex and difficult the programming task, the more
it benefits from being designed and written in a logical and
clear fashion.
I was fortunate enough to study for a PhD at the University of Stirling.
The topic was one that I had proposed myself. Funding ran for three years after which
I needed to return to industry while writing up my thesis in the evenings.
The PhD allowed me to develop
my interest in Computational Neuroscience and self-organising systems.
I had previously found it frustrating that there was so little
research on the effect of hormones and neuromodulators when applied
to artificial neural networks. Instead people prefer to treat the brain
as if it were a logical or digital circuit and I felt sure that we were missing
a large part of the story. The PhD led onto work as a research fellow
at the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire.
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