Curriculum vitae

Brian John Chandler

Personal details

Date of birth: 5 September 1948
Married, three children (born 1982, 1984, 1992)
Nationality: British (Wife: Japanese)

Career history

1959 - 1966 Marling School, Stroud, Gloucestershire

1967 - 1971 St. Catharine's College, Cambridge (UK)

MA (2nd class) in Mathematics (1970)
Distinction in the Diploma in Computer Science (1971)

1971 - 1973 Queen Mary College, London University

Research in theoretical computation under Professor P. J. Landin

1973 - 1976 Bedford College, London University

Research Officer in remote sensing project. Wrote and documented large library of image processing programs (in Fortran) running on CDC6600 and CDC7600 mainframes. Also responsible for microdensitometer analysis of film imagery. In related collaboration with the Royal Dental Hospital, London, some image analysis also carried out on mandible X-ray micrographs.

1977 (November) To Japan, via Trans-Siberian Express

1977 - 1981 Tokyo, Japan

Time divided between studying Japanese and working as freelance technical writer and (later) translator. Specialized in computers, electronics and patents. Principal clients: Fujitsu Facom and Watanabe Instruments Corporation (now Graphtek), and several Patent Offices.

1981 (February - July)

Travelled through South-East Asia, the Indian Subcontinent and Southern Europe to England.

1981 - 1984 ICL, West Gorton, Manchester

Member of Software Support Team supporting marketing of Atlas 10 IBM-compatible mainframe. Responsible for administration of Atlas Group documentation library, including developing cataloguing system. Particularly involved in pre-marketing support of Fujitsu Fortran 77 compiler.

Responsible for some liaison functions in ICL-Fujitsu collaboration. Taught elementary Japanese conversation to ICL staff.

1984 - 1988 ICL/UMIST, Manchester

ICL member of the Alvey-funded English-Japanese machine translation project in the Centre for Computational Linguistics (CCL) at UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology).

Wrote substantial part of core-level interpreter for prototype machine translation system in Prolog. Implemented Japanese morphology system and chart parser. Contributed substantial contrastive English-Japanese knowledge to linguistic content of system.

Partly in collaboration with other team taking part in Alvey project at Sheffield, developed a Japanese character input system, implemented in C in ICL Perq, and later Sun 3 workstations. As second phase of this input system designed and wrote prototype of GUI system ("Englishman's Keyboard") for Japanese input by users who do not read Japanese.

1988 - 1989 Longman Group, Harlow

Responsible for designing dictionary and corpus search software running on Digital Workstations (VME), for the Longman Language Activator thesaural dictionary for second-language learners.

Also wrote the Longman Mini-Concordancer, for MS-DOS. ("A powerful, in-memory text-handling program with excellent text information, wildcard, sort, wordlist and search facilities" ... Chris Tribble and Glyn Jones, in "Concordances in the Classroom", pub. Longman 1989)

1989 (November - December) To Japan, overland across the USA

1990 - present Sano, Tochigi, Japan

Freelance technical (Japanese to English) translator and (English) writer. Particular fields of work include professional video equipment, electrical test equipment, hand-held computers and related equipment; most output is end-user documentation, but also some patent work. Major end customers include Sony, Aiwa, Epson, and Hioki.

Publications

E. S. Owen-Jones, I. R. Galloway, B. J. Chandler: "The application of pattern classification techniques to Skylark earth resources rocket imagery" in Environmental Sensors and Applications, IERE Conference Proceedings No. 29 (1974) pp 81 - 89.

M. M. Cole, E. S. Owen-Jones, P. C. Catt, C. M. Cousans, B. J. Chandler: "An evaluation of visual and semi-automated approaches to the recognition of spectral signatures in air survey and satellite imagery of mineralised natural terrain" Proceedings 15th International Technical Scientific Congress on Space, (Rome, 1975).

E. S. Owen-Jones, B. J. Chandler: "The use of photographic imagery in earth resources studies" Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol 29 (1976).

H. Phillips, E. S. Owen-Jones, B. J. Chandler: "Quantitative histology of bone - a computation method of measuring the hydroxyapatite of bone" Calcified Tissue Research, vol. 14, (1977).

B. J. Castledine, B. J. Chandler (editors): "The 1976 European Go Championship" pub. Dango Enterprises (1977).

B. J. Chandler, E. S. Owen-Jones: "The use of Landsat imagery for terrain analysis" Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol 31, pp 27-40 (1978).

P. J. Whitelock, M. McGee Wood, B. J. Chandler, N. Holden, H. J. Horsfall: "Strategies for machine translation" proceedings of Coling 86, Bonn (1986).

J. J. Carroll, B. J. Chandler, N. Holden, H. J. Horsfall, E. Pollard, M. M. Wood: "Dictionary organisation for machine translation" proceedings of ACL, Copenhagen (1987).

M. McGee Wood, B. J. Chandler: "Machine translation for monolinguals" proceedings of Coling 88 (1988).

Brian Chandler: Longman Mini-Concordancer (software), pub. Longman Group (1989).