I am a lecturer in the Interaction, Media and Communication research group, in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London.

My main research interest is in the computational semantics and pragmatics of dialogue - using the context of a conversation to build models of what people are actually talking about. I am a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for SIGDIAL (the ACL/ISCA special interest group for discourse and dialogue), and was the local organizer for the 2009 conference (which we hosted here at QMUL). I am also a member of the Advisory Board for SEMDIAL (the series of workshops on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue), and was co-chair for the 2010 version, PozDial.

Before arriving at QMUL in 2009, I worked in the Computational Semantics Lab at CSLI, Stanford, on projects building an automatic meeting-understanding system and a conversational dialogue system for cars. Prior to that I did my PhD at King's College London, looking at clarificational dialogue and what it means for dialogue systems. And before any of this academic stuff, I worked as an engineer in the field of active noise & vibration control, mostly with Ultra Electronics and Noise Cancellation Technologies.

During 2008, I spent a year travelling around Europe, Turkey, North and West Africa with my wife (a professional chef) to learn all about food and its traditions. You can read all about it here.

My brother is the artist Ed Purver who's just won the 2010 Celeste Prize for his video work "In Residence". My sister is the structural engineer Kate Purver who designs things like the Kew Gardens Aerial Walkway.

You can donwload a copy of my CV here: PDF