Dr Arthur Thomas
Research Associate
- Profile
- Research
- Events
Profile
Trained as both a biologist (at Oxford) and a computer scientist (at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab), Arthur was founder and continues as CEO of Proteus Associates, a consultancy specialising in applications of information technology to the life sciences, with clients including large pharmaceutical companies, small biotech companies, technology providers and academic institutions.
Arthur has taught computational biology in Switzerland and Semantic Web technologies in the USA. He has been involved in the founding of a half-dozen start-up companies in the USA and Europe. He was also involved in some initial experiments in Web-based distance learning at Balliol in the late 1990s.
Much of his recent work has been in the area of ‘systems biology’: the construction of predictive computational models of biological systems (ranging from the molecular to the whole-organ level) which are used in drug discovery and medicine. He has also been involved for many years in knowledge mining (extracting and managing knowledge from databases and text) and knowledge fusion (supporting complex decision making and collaboration between scientists from different domains and organisations). Much of this work has involved ontological engineering and methods for making inferences on complex knowledge domains. Most recently he has been acting as coordinator for a large e-life-science Grid project in Switzerland, and thinking about how Grid infrastructures and rapidly developing ideas about the ‘Semantic Web’ can be used to support academic / industry cooperation in drug discovery and development.
Positions held at the OII
- Research Associate, November 2006 –
Past projects
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Using Web Archives: A Futures Perspective
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Arthur Thomas, Professor Eric T. Meyer
Web archives are the best hope for future researchers to understand the web of yesterday and today, but efforts to ensure that archives will be useful are lagging. This report asks what challenges web archives face, and suggests how to address them.
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Researcher Engagement with Web Archives
Participants: Dr Arthur Thomas, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Christine Madsen, Dr Sally Wyatt, Dr Charles van den Heuval, Dr Meghan Dougherty
This project explores how to bridge the gap between archivists and researchers, and how preserved web content archives might be used by researchers and others to ask meaningful new questions.
Events
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How credible is the Internet as a medical research tool?
29 August 2013
A leading pioneer on the use of social media discusses some of the key obstacles to their more intensive use by patients and others in health and medical care.