My secondary school: Newington College, Sydney, Australia (1963-1969) First Level Science and Art. Tertiary education includes BSc (Geology) and BA (Economics and Philosophy), University of Canterbury. After undergraduate degrees I wrote the first commercial income tax computer application to receive official NZ government approval, then a large Oracle-based integrated manufacturing-accounting-distribution application and licensed this to NCR Corporation for 22 years. I used the annual license fees to fund independent AI research. (Weird I know but I really love research.)

I stopped full-time application development in 1995 to pursue the research. This included a decade in graduate study under Turing scholar B. Jack Copeland. In this study I was trying to reconcile Turing's computational theory of mind with Searle's Chinese room attack on it. I ended up rejecting both Turing and Searle. Turing because he didn't understand the semantics of mind, the the essence of intelligence; Searle because he didn't understand the semantics of computers. I concluded that Turing was and still is AI's biggest problem. And AI still doesn't understand semantics.

My data compression patents, US 5,748,955 and US 6,414,610, have been cited by Oracle, Google, IBM, Canon, NEC and others. Website: rodsmith.nz.