Phil Cowans

I'm currently CTO at Songkick.com, a startup company providing comprehensive listings and recommendations for live music in the US and UK. Take a look at our ‘About Songkick’ page for more information about the company, and our blog for more information about what we're up to at the moment.

Until November 2007 I was a postdoctoral research associate in the Inference Group, which is part of the physics department of the University of Cambridge. My main role was development of Dasher, a novel user interface for text entry. My work was funded by the The Gatsby Charitable Foundation. During that time I also worked as a contractor in the Information Retrieval group of Microsoft Research Cambridge.

The following is a list of my academic pubilcations, The main focus of which is probabilistic modelling, Bayesian statistics and machine learning, mainly in the context of making computers work in a way that is natural to humans (rather than the other way around!). Particular interests include:

• Novel user interfaces for text entry, in particular The Dasher Project.
• Distributions for modelling hierarchically organised data, including the hierarchical Dirichlet process and friends.
• Natural language modelling, particularly using techniques from Bayesian machine learning.
• Information retrieval using probabilistic whole collection models.
• Applications of Bayesian machine learning to processing input in pen-based computing.

2007

• J. Mead, P.J. Cowans and D.J.C. MacKay, Efficient Communication Through the Timings of One or Two Buttons, work in progress.

2006

• PhD Thesis - Probabilistic Document Modelling

2005

• P.J. Cowans and M. Szummer, A Graphical Model for Simultaneous Partitioning and Labeling, Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS '05), Jan. 2005. [ps] [pdf]. Slides: [Microsoft PowerPoint].

2004

• M. Szummer and P.J. Cowans, Incorporating Context and User Feedback in Pen-Based Interfaces, AAAI Fall Workshop on Making Pen-Based Interaction Intelligent and Natural, Oct. 2004. [ps] [pdf]
• P. J. Cowans, Information Retrieval Using Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes, Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '04), Aug. 2004, pp. 564-565. [ps] [pdf]. Slides from talk to the NLIP group at the Computer Laboratory: [pdf].

2003

• M. Garrett, D. Ward, I. Murray, P.J. Cowans and D.J.C. MacKay, Implementation of Dasher, an information efficient input mechanism, 4th Annual GNOME Users And Developers European Conference, Jun. 2003 and UKUUG Linux Conference, Jul. 2003. [ps] [pdf]

[BibTeX file for the above references]

• Dasher - information efficient text entry.

The best way to contact me is almost always by e-mail. My e-mail address is:

(Sorry about making that a graphic - it makes it harder to harvest for spam). If you need my phone number or postal address, please ask me by e-mail.