Peter Jackson

Professional Information

I am currently chief scientist at Thomson Reuters with responsibility for corporate research and development. Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for business and professionals.

Research & Development is a group of over 40 research scientists and software engineers that provides enabling technologies to our global publishing and solutions businesses. Our labs are located in Minnesota and New York.

Our specialty is applied research and rapid development to prove new product concepts and deliver key components of the final system. Main areas of expertise are information retrieval, document categorization, machine learning, and data mining.

R&D innovations have powered many new online services in recent years, such as the Reuters Insider video portal, the ResultsPlus recommendation system, and WestSearch, the new search engine on WestlawNext.

In addition to running R&D, I am also responsible for university liaison with respect to joint research projects. Right now, our closest relationships are with MIT, NYU and CMU.

Since 1981, I have published 3 books and about 40 refereed papers on diverse topics in artificial intelligence and natural language processing.  I am also an inventor on 4 US patents.

Over the years, I have worked on a variety of projects involving search engines, expert systems, speech recognition, automated reasoning, and recommender systems.

Check out research and software positions currently available in Thomson Reuters R&D.

Personal Information 

I was born in Barbados and went to school in England.  I have also lived in Scotland (Edinburgh) and the United States (Saint Louis, MO and Rochester, NY).  Now I live in Saint Paul, MN.

I am serving my sixth year on the Board of Directors for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.  In recent times, I have traveled to Chicago, New York and Ojai to support the SPCO on tour.

What's New?

Attended Aspen Ideas Festival, June 26 to July 3.  Moderated a panel on the Future of Work, see video.

Attended International Conference on AI & Law, Pittsburgh, June 6-10.  Also visited Carnegie Mellon University.

Attended New Directions in Text Analysis conference at Harvard University, May 20-21.

Speaking on R&D Commercialization at MHTA Spring Conference in Minneapolis on April 14.

Attending the SIIA Information Industry Summit in January, and speaking at Strata in February.

Visited the National Security Agency in December, and served on a panel on Social Media at CMU.

Attended the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco in November.

Joined the Dean's Advisory Board for the University of MN College of Science and Engineering in September.

Participated in a roundtable on the Future of Work at the Aspen Institute in August.