Interview with David Brailsford

Abstract

David Brailsford is the John Dunford Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, UK. In 1986 he co-founded the Computer Science department and he was appointed to the Dunford chair in 1990. He served as Head of Department from 1990 to 1998. Since 1982 his research interests have focused on digital documents and on document engineering. He was General Chair for the first of the biennial "EP" conferences, which was held in Nottingham in 1986. This conference series then transformed into the annual, ACM-sponsored, Document Engineering Symposium from 2001 onwards. He has been on the program committee for these conferences since 1986 and he served as Program Chair for DocEng2006. In 1988 he founded the Wiley journal "Electronic Publishing" which he edited for 10 years. Arising from this journal John Wiley Ltd funded a long-running research project, at Nottingham, on the automated internal hyperlinking of journals in PDF format. This led to a further collaboration with Wendy Hall, at the University of Southampton, on the more general hyperlinking of journal articles in a variety of formats. David has collaborated with Adobe Systems Inc. on digital document research for more than 20 years. His research group became the first UK beta test site for Adobe Acrobat in 1992 and, over the years, six of his graduate students have supplemented their research training by undertaking summer internships at Adobe. Most of the joint research has centered around structured document components in PDF but more recently interest has turned to the possibilities for rich media documents in Adobe's AIR. Since 2003 his Document Engineering Research Group has also collaborated with HP Laboratories on research topics ranging from XSLT transformations through to Variable Data Printing and eBooks.