Tom Addis is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computing, University of Portsmouth. Since 1994 is a visiting Professor at the Science Studies Centre, Department of Psychology at the University of Bath. He has had a regular technical exchange with the University of Delft involving postgraduate students. For the last 20 years, he has been actively engaged, in conjunction with Prof. Gooding (Science Historian at the University of Bath), in modelling the 'discovery' process. David was a long standing friend and colleague who died of leukaemia in December 2009. Tom Addis with the help of others is hoping to create the book that was to follow Drawing Programs. Tom Addis has worked with the MPRI UK, an American company involved with teaching mariners how to handle large oil carriers, since 1998 where he has developed an expert control and assessment system for the mariners learning how to handle oil tankers. He has also worked with Portech Ltd creating an intelligent robot control system. He has investigated the use of architectural and urban development theories to understand system evolution as well as exploring 'metaphor' as a mechanism for human computer interaction.
Tom Addis joined ICL Research and Advanced Development Centre in 1969 to work on computer speech recognition and user behaviour; the prototype ICL Content Addressable Files Server from which the technique of Extended Relational Analysis evolved. This was applied to developing a series of artificial intelligent systems. In 1981 he moved to Brunel University and in 1986 to the University of Reading as Professor of Computer Science. He was technical consultant to GEC Hirst Research Laboratories for nine years where he developed an engine for knowledge storage. It was during this time that the elements of Schematic Functional Programming emerged, as limitations of ERA (Extended Relational Analysis) became apparent. With Plessey he evolved a wafer manufacturing scheduling system that was deployed in their plant at Plymouth.
He has over 90 major publications since 1970, he is co-author with his wife of the book Drawing Programs, and sole author of the book Designing Knowledge-Based Systems and also co-editor of four research books. He was an Associate Editor of the Int. J. Human Computer Studies, and is a MInstP, CPhys, FBCS, FIET, CEng, CITP and FRSA.
Tom Addis is married to Jan Addis who is a mathematician and independent consultant. She originally joined Computer Analysts and Programmers Ltd in 1968 as a computer programmer where she produced computer generated timetables (in Assembler) for BA (then BEA) and a suite of monitoring software (in PL1 and Assembler) for the Concorde fatigue-testing program. Between 1971 and 1982 she took a career break and then returned to Reading University as an applications and support programmer. During that time she provided special teaching aids and a name-server for the Reading electronic mail system. In 1987 she linked up with Tom Addis where she investigated man-machine interfaces for programs developed within new computational paradigms. This led to the concept of the Clarity environment described in the book Drawing Programs. In 1989 Jan developed pagination and interactive editing of the Swedish Yellow Pages. In 1990 she left the group to become a research officer at the Bath University, where she was involved with Profs. David Gooding and Tom Addis in creating the Clarity environment.
In 1996 Jan Addis became a visiting research fellow, a part-time lecturer at Portsmouth University and Managing Director of Clarity Support Ltd. Between 2001 and 2002 she worked as a Research Fellow on the Amuse Project at Portsmouth University.
