AI, agents & prototypes

The current work is creative AI and agentics: building AI agents and agentic workflows, prototyping software fast enough to find out whether an idea holds up, and wiring the results into real production pipelines with Python, ComfyUI and APIs. Soundings, where agents sweep the Companies House register every month to map the UK creative economy, is the clearest example of what that looks like in practice.

Around that sits commercially and industry-focused R&D, software prototyping and experimental content work. I have worked with a lot of organisations on emerging technology innovations, inventions, patents and new ways of working, and helped set up companies, launch products and get platforms off the ground.

A lot of it comes back to data made visible: digital twins of cities joined to live data, geospatial work inside games engines, and the visualisation that turns a dataset into something people can actually read. Dreaming of Electric Sheep built a digital twin of Liverpool; Geospatial Data put Google Maps inside Unreal Engine for realtime built environments.

It all rests on the craft underneath: creative production technology, software engineering, experiential technology, games engines, virtual production, data and music. Since the early 2000s I have mostly been industry based, with spells as a senior researcher and academic at a number of universities.

I am part of the team that developed the MusicFutures Creative Cluster in the Liverpool City Region, working with 28 regional and national partners, which won £6.75m plus industry co-investment over five years from 2025.

Before that I led R&D and innovation at the MediaCity Immersive Technologies Innovation Hub, supporting over 35 funded collaborations with industry and hundreds of business assists on a £3.2m accelerator programme.

I have worked on research with the University of Liverpool's Centre for Architecture and the Visual Arts and at the Institute of Art and Technology at LJMU, where I co-ran the Experimental Technologies Lab, winning grants from the AHRC, Innovate UK and commercial investors.

From 2015 to 2018 my R&D was mainly with Manchester's School of Digital Arts, focused on immersive storytelling. Between 2010 and 2015 it sat within the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University, working on digital engagement with new media, digital publishing and digital storytelling.

I also support R&D across the UK: in the College of Experts at XR Stories in York, and as an external bid reviewer and advisor for the EPSRC, CoSTAR and Digital Catapult.