The author takes a broader view and is interested particularly in the engineering of information systems in the wider sense embracing information retrieval, hypermedia, office systems, user interfaces, workflow, B2C and B2B, messaging, data analysis, knowledge discovery, KBS (knowledge-based systems) assists... all to solve real problems either in the SET (Science, Engineering, Technology) world represented by the UK Research Council communities or in commerce and industry.

The emerging GRIDs architecture for UK is a realisation of many of these challenges for the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and CS (Computer Science) communities.

Keith has extensive experience in consultancy, project management and product development both within the public sector and the commercial sector. He has been involved actively in EC-funded projects as coordinator, system architect and in technical and exploitation roles.

Previous positions included running a Division for Information Systems Engineering, leading a database and office systems service group, running a group using computing for environmental science data storage, retrieval, analysis and modelling, and leading a team providing a computing service to the UK Geological Survey.

Keith holds a BSc in Geology, a PhD in Geology (with a very large computing content!) and is a Fellow of both the Geological Society of London and the British Computer Society. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Irish Computer Society. He is a trustee (past secretary and currently vice-president) of the Endowment Board of the VLDB (Very Large Database) Conference, and is a member of the boards controlling the EDBT (Extending Database Technology) conference, CAiSE (Conference on Advanced Systems Engineering) conference and OOIS (Object-Oriented Information Systems) conference. He is a member of the SOFSEM Steering Committee. He serves on several programme committees for international and national conferences, he reviews material for journals and books and reviews research proposals for several countries. He has numerous publications in refereed journals, books and conference proceedings. He holds the positions of Honorary Professor of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Honorary Professor of Computer Science at University College of Wales, Cardiff, Honorary Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic and Senior Visiting Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Birmingham.