James Brusey received his BApSc with distinction in Computer Science from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (now RMIT University), Melbourne, Australia, in 1996. In 2002, the same institution awarded him his PhD in Artificial Intelligence for a thesis entitled “Learning Behaviours For Robot Soccer”, which also won the Australian Computer Science Association’s award for Best Computer Science PhD Thesis for Australia and New Zealand in 2004. He has augmented his research reputation with wide ranging professional experience in both industry and academia. His early experiences in the Swinburne Institute of Technology twined both threads together: as a systems programmer he maintained the in-house software and mainframe, whilst also lecturing on x86 Assembly Language.
In 1989, he began working for AXA Australia as a systems programmer. The reliable and robust systems he developed earned his team two company awards for excellence. He left AXA in 1996, but within two years had returned to perform legacy mainframe maintenance and provide training for staff in diagnostic methods and mainframe assembly languages. This experience embellished his industrial training acumen acquired during his time as a technical consultant with Storage Technology Australia (StorageTek).
In October 2002 he came to the UK as a Senior Research Associate in Cambridge University’s Institute of Manufacturing, initially on a grant from MIT’s Auto-ID Centre. At Cambridge he acquired significant hands-on experience of working with RFID, constructing a realistic RFID demonstration, employing industrial robots. This formed a key deliverable for the Auto-ID Centre project. The Centre subsequently became EPCglobal Inc, and is responsible for the EPCglobal set of standards and specifications governing the use of RFID in the retail sector. These standards are founded on the principle of an Electronic Product Code (EPC), which uniquely identifies everything from forklift trucks to fizzy drinks cans. He joined the Cogent team as a Senior Lecturer in 2007.
His current research interests include developing fault tolerant and robust wireless sensor network systems.