Having learned to programme on a Commodore 64 at the age of 8, I decided to further my knowledge of computing by undertaking a Computer Science degree. After completing my degree I undertook a PhD in Constraint Programming (CP), a branch of Artificial Intelligence. Difficult problems can offer too many choices, many of which are incompatible, few of which are optimal. CP is a technology that will make it easier for computers to help us make these choices. I won the BCS award for the Young IT Practitioner of the year in 2004 for work I conducted during an internship at NASA where I invented a CP based algorithms for processing the data obtained from earth observing satellites. I finished my PhD in 2004 and since then have worked in various post-doctoral positions. I was awarded a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin?s Research Fellowship in October 2007, which I currently hold in the Computing Laboratory at Oxford University. I am also the chair of BCSWomen.
