His early research covered the application of natural language processing techniques to information retrieval. This broadened to cover content-based retrieval of information in all media, including text, image, audio and digital video. Alan’s current research interests are around human memory and how we forget and remember some things and not others. For years we’ve been building systems that help people find information accurately and quickly, yet half the time people are searching for things they once knew but have forgotten. We’ve never really asked why they forgot in the first place, so Alan focuses on building systems that help people remember and to learn, not to plug the gap when they forget. This means that the tools he uses are machine learning and data analytics, and the applications of text, image, and video analysis are in areas like learning analytics, personal sensing, and lifelogging. This can be summarised as developing data analytics for new and traditional forms of media.