Paul Compton

I worked at the Garvan Insist of Medical Research for 20 years, initially as biophysicist but then as a computer scientist. At the Garvan I worked on one of the first medical expert systems to go into routine use. In 1990 I moved to Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW, where my research focus was mainly on better ways to build expert or knowledge-based systems and resulted in a family of techniques known as Ripple-Down Rules. This work was supported by a number of ARC grants, and has been successfully commercialised by Pacific Knowledge Systems (now Beamtree) and other companies internationally. I was one of the founders of PKS, but am not involved with Beamtree. I was also the Associate Dean (research) for the Faculty of Engineering at UNSW for 3 years and and head or acting head of the School of Computer Science and Engineering for 12 years. I retired in 2010 and am currently an advisor to Rich Data Corporation.