Peter Jackson

Personal Statement

I am a seasoned technology executive with a background that includes over 30 years experience in R&D, the last 15 of which have been spent in the online information business. I have a proven track record of working with new product development and strategic marketing functions to deliver state-of-the-art applications that generate new revenues. My specialty lies in the design and delivery of innovative platforms and novel solution components for document retrieval, text categorization and information extraction technologies.  In my current role, I am also responsible for university liaison and collaboration.

Experience in Internet Publishing

2008-.  Chief Scientist & Vice-President, Technology, Thomson Reuters.

Recent projects include video search for business news, database merging for public records, federated search and browsing for legal documents, and basic research on machine learning methods for information extraction.

2007-2008.  Chief Scientist & Vice-President, Technology, Thomson Corporation.

Leader of Research & Development, a group of 40 scientists, with responsibility for technical innovation across Thomson's global businesses in the areas of search, metadata, and language processing.

2005-2006. Chief Research Scientist & Vice-President, Technology, Thomson Legal & Regulatory (TLR).

Group achievements include the development of information extraction software for Thomson West's Litigation Monitor product and creation of a Japanese language search engine for Westlaw.

2002-2004. Vice-President, Research & Development, Thomson Legal & Regulatory.

Group achievements include the release of a new document recommendation system for Westlaw, called ResultsPlus, and the incorporation of automatic document categorization into the West KM knowledge management suite.

2000-2002. Senior Director, Research & Development, Thomson Legal & Regulatory.

Group achievements include non-English indexing and retrieval technology to establish three new online services: Westlaw DE (Germany), Editions Yvon Blais (Canada), LaLey (Argentina) and IOB (Brazil).

1997-2000. Director, Computer Science Research, West Group.

Group achievements include new document linking and database selection software in production on Westlaw, plus named entity extraction for attorneys, judges and expert witnesses in case law.

1995-1997. Lead Software Engineer, Natural Language Group, Thomson Legal Publishing.

Group achievements include implementation of a computer-assisted citation manager called History Assistant that extracts rulings from court reports and identifies the impacted cases.

Academics, Professional

B.Sc. Human Psychology, University of Aston in Birmingham, UK, 1976-1979.

Ph.D. Artificial Intelligence, Leeds University, UK, 1979-1982.

Lecturer, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University, Scotland, 1983-1988.

Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Science, Washington University in Saint Louis, 1992.

Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, USA, 1992-1995.

Visiting Professor, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Singapore Polytechnic, 1994.

Author of three books: Introduction to Expert Systems, Addison-Wesley, 1986, 1990, 1999; Logic-Based Knowledge Representation, MIT Press, 1989; Natural Language Processing for Online Applications: Text Retrieval, Extraction & Categorization, John Benjamins, 2002, 2007.

Author of about 40 refereed papers on automated reasoning, expert systems, natural language processing and information retrieval, 1981-.

Co-Inventor on 4 United States patents: 7,062,498 and 7,580,939, Systems, methods and software for classifying text from judicial opinions and other documents, granted June 13, 2006 and August 25, 2009.  Also 7,593,920 and 7,620,626, System, method, and software for identifying historically related opinions, granted September 22, 2009 and November 17, 2009.

Advisory Committee, World Wide Web Consortium, 1999-2003.

Advisory Committee, University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center,  2003-2007.

Executive Advisory Board for Curriculum, MIS Research Center, Carlson School of Management, 2002-2006.

Program Committee, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL), 2001-2009.

Program Committee, IASTED Conference on Law and Technology (LAWTECH), 2006.

Program Committee, European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), 2008, 2009.

Reviewer for FFG Ősterreichische Forschungsfőrderungsgesellschaft (Austrian Research Promotion Agency), FIT-IT Semantic Systems, 2006, 2008.

Board member, SIIA Content Division.

Member of AAAI, IEEE, ACM.