CEO & Founder - Dr. Tim Willis

Tim has spent much of the past two decades in teaching, study and research in Computational Linguistics, interspersed with some sales and marketing. His doctoral research was on the methods people employed in abbreviation, in order to inform a system for automatic abbreviation expansion, initially aimed at computer users with motor disabilities. This led to the Flexpansion system, which has a much wider potential user group - people for whom typing is in any way slow, for instance due to inexperience, or because they are using a small keyboard on a handheld device.

He holds a BA in Linguistics and Phonetics (Leeds University), an MSc in Cognitive Science & Natural Language (Edinburgh University), and a PhD in Informatics (Edinburgh). He was a Research Assistant at Leeds University and Lancaster University, where he worked on building and annotating three large databases ('corpora') of English language, analysed in high detail.

Tim has experience in project and team management, and has worked in sales for a web design company in Cumbria. He also dealt with the correspondence and merchandise for a succesful band in the 1990's, which produced some great anecdotes.

Tim enjoys white-water kayaking ('terrifying but exhilarating'), climbing and snowsports. He has also done a couple of stand-up comedy routines in front of audiences of a hundred ('just terrifying').