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I was born in Broxbourne, Herts., in 1944. My earliest known Sampson ancestor began life in the Isle of Ely; him apart, my family roots are predominantly in London, in the (until recently, French-speaking) island of Guernsey, and in the far West Country.
I was educated at Bristol Grammar School and St John’s College, Cambridge University, followed by graduate study at Yale University (USA).
I am a husband, father, and grandfather.
By profession I am an academic. During my career I have migrated in terms of subject area from Oriental languages through linguistics to computing, with side interests in various aspects of philosophy and political and economic thought.
Before retiring from full-time employment in 2009 I was teaching E-Business, and IT Law. “E-Business” means electronic business: how information technology is changing the nature of business and trade. The first edition of my book on this topic seemed to be the earliest textbook on e-business to be aimed at computer science students rather than businesspeople. (The current edition came out in 2008.) Likewise, my online textbook on Law for Computing Students, which an innovative Danish publisher brought out in 2009, seems to have no close competitor to date.
My most recent full-time post was Professor of Natural Language Computing, in the School of Informatics at the University of Sussex. (I served for several years as Chairman of that university’s former Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence department.) Since 2009 I have been working as a freelancer for various academic publishers, and pursuing my scholarly interests as an independent agent.
Apart from teaching and a great deal of admin work, and some of the kind of research that one does alone with one’s books in one’s study or a library carrel, much of the work I did during my years as a university prof involved leading small teams of researchers in the execution of computing projects sponsored by the Ministry of Defence and by various national Research Councils.
In 1998 I took on a role in helping to foster the development of language and speech technology internationally, when I was appointed an Executive Board member of ELSNET, the European Language and Speech “Network of Excellence”. (The European Commission now prefers the term “Human Language Technologies”, but we retained the acronym ELSNET.) From 2000 onwards ELSNews, the European newsletter on human language technologies, was produced at Sussex under my direction (changing European research priorities have regrettably now led to its demise).
Anyone interested in getting an impression of life in my research team can read a third-party description. The American sociologist Greg Myers used my team for a case study of social relationships in scientific research — his article “Politeness and certainty” appeared in Social Studies of Science, vol. 21, 1991.
I am a liberal, in the received sense of that term (NB not the recent American sense). That is, I advocate freedom of the individual and oppose over-mighty States and collective institutions. I do not believe that democratic election confers legitimacy on unnecessarily oppressive government. That said, since a society must be governed somehow, I do believe that the parliamentary democracy which we had in Britain in the late-19th and 20th centuries was probably about the least worst way of doing the job. (Anyone who still thinks of Britain as a parliamentary democracy in the 21st century really ought to read Peter Oborne’s Triumph of the Political Class.)
My book An End to Allegiance has received favourable comment as a survey of the “classical liberal” / “libertarian” / “New Right” movement.
In the 1970s and early 1980s I was active in the movement to replace socialist with market principles in British society. By the late 1980s, socialism in the traditional, economic sense had died the death; but it revived in the 1990s in a new, biology-related form as the Political Correctness movement, which I equally oppose. I have been active also in the effort to resist European encroachment on the political independence of the United Kingdom.
Organizations that I support (whether with time and effort, with a subscription only, or sometimes nowadays merely with goodwill — time and funds are both finite, alas) include:
My current leisure interests include fellwalking, genealogy, and heraldry – I serve as an adviser on heraldic matters to members of NADFAS, the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies.
last changed 22 Aug 2009