Dr Gordon Rugg is head of the Knowledge Modelling Group at Keele University, Staffordshire, England, and a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Open University, UK. He is on the editorial board of Expert Systems: the Journal of Knowledge Engineering and a member of  the Editorial Review Board for the International Journal of Information and Operations Management Education (IJIOME). He is co-author of three books:  The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research (Open University Press, 2004), A Gentle Guide to Research Methods (Open University Press/McGraw-Hill, 2006) , and The Stress-Free Guide to Studying at University (Sage, 2008) and sole author of a fourth: Using Statistics: A Gentle Introduction (Open University Press/McGraw-Hill, 2007).

Much of his work involves ways of handling knowledge, such as how to elicit knowledge that people are unable to put into words; how to represent information and knowledge so that it is easy for people to understand; and how to check for errors in expert reasoning. This work has included case studies in a range of disciplines, including biochemistry, podiatry and autism research.

Dr Rugg is co-developer of the Verifier method for detecting errors in expert reasoning about difficult problems. His first case study involved a cryptographic problem which had been unsolved for over ninety years, despite concerted study by some of the world’s best cryptographers – the Voynich Manuscript. Previous researchers had concluded that the text in the manuscript was too complex to be a meaningless hoax; within a few months, Dr Rugg demonstrated that this conclusion was based on faulty reasoning, and demonstrated a way of producing very similar text to that in the manuscript using low technology methods. This study was published in the leading peer-reviewed journal of historical cryptography, Cryptologia and in Scientific American. A subsequent paper in the same journal by Austrian researcher Dr Andreas Schinner applied sophisticated statistical analysis to the manuscript, and concluded that the manuscript’s text was probably meaningless gibberish produced in a similar way to the one described by Dr Rugg.

The second case study applied the Verifier method to the literature on autism, in a study by Sue Gerrard and Dr Rugg. This resulted in an article in the leading peer-reviewed journal in the field, the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (JADD), which has just been published. The article identifies several key assumptions in the autism literature which are based on faulty reasoning or use of evidence; it also outlines a model of autism which integrates much previous work in the field into a new framework.

Selected bibliography:

  1. Gerrard, S. & Rugg, G. (2009); Sensory Impairments and Autism: A Re-Examination of Causal Modelling; Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 39(10) October, 2009
  2. Beardmore, J., Rugg, G. & Exley, C. (2007). A systems biology approach to the blood-aluminium problem: The application and testing of a computational model. Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry 101, pp.1187-1191.
  3. Curran, M.J., Rugg, G. & Campbell, J. (2006). Would podiatrists benefit from an expert system for clinical reasoning and diagnosis? The Foot, 16, pp71-75
  4. Rugg, G. (2004). The Mystery of  the Voynich Manuscript. Scientific American, July 2004, pp. 104-109.
  5. Rugg, G. (2004). An elegant hoax? A possible solution to the Voynich manuscript. Cryptologia, XXVIII(1), January 2004, pp. 31-46

Consultancy background
Dr Rugg is a director of several companies, and his consultancy experience includes work for G4S, one of the largest private security providers in the UK. His work with them featured in several leading trade venues, including Security World magazine and the British Retail Consortium Yearbook.

Twitter Example
He and his colleagues use a range of methods, including proprietary software developed by them, to tackle problems. For example, his colleague Ed de Quincey recently featured in the media because of his software for using text analysis of Twitter messages to trace the spread of flu: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/swine-flu/6193551/Twitter-could-help-health-official-track-swine-flu.html
On the Web:
http://www.scm.keele.ac.uk/research/knowledge_modelling/km/people/gordon_rugg/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Rugg
Autism:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/j75v5146620k120q/