Dr. James Stanier
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Who?
As of 12th September 2011 I am at Brandwatch. I work on web crawling, scraping, text mining and analysis, and a bunch of other cool things.
During my time at Sussex, I completed my Ph.D. which investigates the practicalities of compilation using solely data flow. We did so by using a special data flow graph intermediate representation that allows all but essential control flow to be discarded in order to aid optimisation. Then, we used clever techniques to restore control flow before generating code. Check out the research page for more information! My supervisor was Dr. Des Watson.
I was Departments Chief for ACM XRDS magazine, which is a really good quarterly read.
My CV is available here. My face as ASCII art resides here.
Research and work interests
Currently, at Brandwatch, I'm very interested in scraping and crawling the web, natural language processing, and large amounts of data.
My doctorate interests were in high-level language compilers. More specifically, most of the compilation work I have done so far has been with building, optimising, and generating code from graph-based data flow intermediate representations. I lean more towards practice than theory, however, the two regularly intertwine.
As a consequence of being a member of a cross-disciplinary research group I've also been involved in work on trust models and P2P network simulators. On the side I enjoy writing and editing, and ACM XRDS has given me a great outlet for that.
I guess that, all in all, I just enjoy learning and having fun trying out new things. I'm quite lucky that I get to do that in day to day life.