After his first degree in Computing, Steve worked for a year as a COBOL programmer with British Steel before returning to Sheffield University to study for an MSc Information Systems which led to a PhD in IR (Information Retrieval). His research was in the implementation and evaluation of novel algorithms for textbased retrieval, which are at the heart of Internet search engines such as Google. He completed my PhD in 1989 and after this, took up a teaching position at the University of Sheffield in the Department of Information Studies. He left Sheffield to take up his current position at the University of Huddersfield in 1993.