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My grandmother moved to Oslo from Northern Troms in Northern Norway in 1916.
Her native tongue was Sami and that makes me a Sami by law even though I have
only visited my family there a few times. I was brought up in a strictly
areligious home and have been a member of the humanist society from birth.
I was born in Oslo, Norway in 1971 and lived there happily until 1991. As a
child I was given a solid christian upbringing (not!) in the Oslo YMCA. I met
many of my best friends at the Oslo Cathedral School including
Dr Johan Kristian Sveen who is now a postdoc in the G. K. Batchelor Lab in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, UK.
I joined Kristian's band Soldogg (Sundew) and together we recorded a single that no one bought.
After I left though, they got a contract and released several CDs.
All through my time in Norway I seemed to spend much time with a shady chracter
called Eivind Lilleskjæret who now runs his own translation company
Fidotext.
I also managed to do a one year degree in Business Administration at the
Norwegian School of Management.
After my rather short carrier in management I left for the town of Horten where
I spent one year in the Norwegian Naval Officers Academy as a part of
my national service. Among other young promising cadets there was a nice,
friendly boy, Audun Taraldsen, who moved to Tempe, Arizona and started a digital signage comany
Norvision.
In 1992 I embarked the Norwegian Coast Guard Vessel "Senja" and spent one year
onboard her as Junior Operation Room Officer and shop keeper. This service
took me to the Arctic and in particular to the island of Svalbard.
I left the Navy in 1993 and went to London, England to start a four year MEng
course in Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering. During these four
years I saw some west end plays and played quite a bit of football. I kept
moving westwards from Imperial College's halls of residence in South
Kensington, via Hammersmith to South Ealing. The last year in South-Ealing I
shared a flat with a most peculiar French person,
Dr Mathieu S. Capcarrere.
Mathieu now teches computer science at the University of Kent, UK.
My work placement for my MEng was with Hewlett-Packard's Research Laboratory
in Bristol, so after four years in London I moved even further west to Bath
to live with my then girlfriend now wife, Jude and our daughter Francesca.
After a short spell of employment with Hewlett-Packard again I went to
do a PhD with the Machine Learning Research Group at the University of Bristol.
In Bristol I met a stray Mexican,
Dr Rene MacKinney
who shared my passion for football and science fiction. My thesis was on
Learning and Adaptation in Behaviour-Based Robotics.
In July 1999 Jude and I got married in Cornwall.
In February 2000 we had a beautiful girl who we named Alida after that Sami grandmother in paragraph one.
I found robots so interesting that I accepted a Post-Doctoral Research
Fellowship with the Robotics Research Laboratories at the University of
Southern California, Los Angeles, thus extending my westward journey across the
atlantic ocean to the United States of America.
While at USC I shared an office with a friendly Australian
Dr Ashley Tews
who like me, was finishing
his PhD thesis and trying to understand americans both at the same time
After almost ten year abroad it was time to return to my roots
I was offered a position as Research Scientist at the Norwegian Defence Research
Establishment, so back to the military for me though no uniforms this time.
In April 2003 we had a son, Benjamin.
In January 2004 Jude got her MA with honours just to make a point.
After struggling through almost two years of depression we decided that Norway wasn't for us and I got a place as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales, Newport.
In Newport I founded the Robotic Intelligence Lab, later to become the Cognitive Robotics Research Centre.
In 2009 I was also promoted from Senior Lecturer to Reader in Cognitive Robotics.
In 2011 Francesca moved out of home and started her Photography studies in London at the London College of Communication.
Eventually, I got an offer of a better position at the University of Plymouth and an opportunity to live by the sea, so we decided to move to the beautiul town of Totnes.