Alastair James

Alastair James gained a PhD whilst researching computer Speech Recognition on mobile devices, and worked on standards jointly developed with Motorola. Artificial Intelligence (such as Speech Recognition) is the original Big Data problem, and during this time he gained an excellent understanding of how to apply pattern recognition and other statistical techniques to large amounts of data.

Having escaped academia, Alastair teamed up with James Dunford Wood to found Adnet, a contextual advertising system which was an early innovator in the data-driven advertising revolution. Adnet used statistical and linguistic information about the behaviour of web users to optimise the effectiveness of the advertising they see. However, he soon realised that the real challenge is for companies to optimise the effectiveness of their visitors once they arrive on their website.