Management Team

Dr. Russell Collingham

Director and founder of VoxDev Ltd. Previous roles Chief Scientist for DQ Lab Ltd and before that Managing Director for Tisento Technologies Ltd (a spin-off from 3F Ltd) a developer of speech recognition software for Telecom applications. Founding Director of 3F Ltd. in 1997, a developer of speech and natural language understanding software. Holder of 1st class honours in Computer Science (1989) and a PhD in speech recognition (1994) from Durham University.

Key responsibilities and achievements:

• For VoxDev: Responsible for building a large scale IVR platform based on Asterisk, design and implementation of customer solutions for a number of clients. Consultancy on various speech projects (West Midlands & Sussex police forces, EasyJet/NCP, Ringo parking system).
• For DQ Lab: Lead the design of DQ AutoVoice, and implementation of the front and back ends of the software component in particular the interaction with numerous speech recognition engines (SpeechPearl, OSR, Nuance). Designed and implemented several applications for customers, and developed many demonstration systems to highlight the capabilities of DQ Lab’s software.
• For 3F/Tisento: Design, implementation and project management of ARA – a large scale telephone-based speech recognition system and architecture for directory enquiries (software and hardware) – a four year, £3 million, project under sub-contract to an Italian telecommunications company.
• For 3F/Tisento: Design and implementation of a natural language conversational dialogue component of the Concepts system, later used in the PC and internet computer game Girland (www.girland.com) and the web query tool FlexAnswer (www.flexanswer.com). Design and implementation of document classification/learning algorithm used in FlexAnswer. Managed a team of 16 software engineers, linguists and support personnel.

Earlier appointments:

For four years, a lecturer in Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University, researching into automatic speech recognition and the interface with natural language understanding systems.

In addition to his management capabilities described above, Dr. Collingham has over 25 years experience in computer programming. Since gaining his first class honours degree in Computer Science in 1989, Dr. Collingham has pursued a career in artificial intelligence, specialising in speech and text (natural language) systems. Following some early research projects, his career has had a total focus on the design and development of large-scale systems for live deployment, both in Italy and the UK.

Paul Thomas

Director and founder of VoxDev Ltd. Specialising in large scale, rapid development projects for a number of customers. Mr. Thomas has over 20 years experience in computer programming. Since gaining his 2:1 honours degree in Computer Science in 1992, he has been a senior software engineer/technical architect on a variety of large projects, for example 5 years as lead software engineer on the 3F Concepts Natural Language Understanding System, Team leader at JP Morgan developing a multinational trading system and Technical Manager at the Centre for Electronic Commerce working on EU research projects.

During these projects, Mr. Thomas has demonstrated a wide and deep knowledge of software development techniques for a variety of platforms, applications and languages. Mr. Thomas has first hand experience of leading customers through the setup and installation process. Throughout these very technical customer interactions, Mr. Thomas has again and again demonstrated his deep knowledge of computing and left a lasting impression to the extent that customers contact Mr. Thomas for advice on technical issues.

Key responsibilities and achievements:

• For VoxDev: Involved in the design and implementation of a large scale IVR platform based on Asterisk, and the design and implementation web based systems for a number of clients.
• For VoxDev: he was involved in the design and implementation of new versions of e-commerce systems for Harveys Furniture and Bensons for Beds brands (HomeStyle UK).
• For VoxDev: team lead for the development of a new web based BTEC examiner training/grading system, and exam marker allocations (Pearsons Edexcel).
• For VoxDev: development of their web based interface and applications to BT’s Wholesale line rental (WLR) provisioning system and development of the backend management systems (Pearsons Government Solutions)
• For VoxDev: design and development of their new system to build and store data, used to publish their dictionaries, using shared data between dictionaries and being able to extract the data from the database in a format suitable for publishing (Harper Collins).
• For VoxDev: design and development of web based e-commerce systems for large retail outlets, including integration to their telephony and mail order systems (2Touch/Acxiom).
• For DQ Lab: designed and implemented the core communication and distribution performance critical algorithm that is central to DQ AutoVoice. In addition, he has integrated DQ products with several 3rd party IVR applications, such as Envox, and provided the installation packages for the products, and developed web-based management systems for various customer applications.
• For 3F: lead software engineer in the development of a number of major components for a natural language processing system, and development of applications using the NLP system, Girland, a role based game for teenage girls, and FlexAnswer which is a web based intelligent FAQ system.