Tim is more a computer scientist and software developer than anything else.
View his Help East Timor page here - several exciting philanthropic projects listed.( https://sites.google.com/site/helpeasttimor/ ) Tim can be contacted as tim @ edval.com.au
Dr Tim Cooper was one of the 3 founders, and is currently a director of SmartsGroup: www.smartsgroup.com SmartsGroup is a Sydney based company with 71 employees worldwide. SmartsGroup is the global leader in financial market surveillance systems.
SMARTS employs pattern matching techniques to identify violations of trading rules, and also instances of insider trading, market manipulation, money laundering and tax evasion. It uses proprietary database technology developed by Tim.
Edval is software designed for timetabling Australian high schools. It has powerful algorithms for automatically or semi-automatically constructing timetables (scheduling lessons, staffing, rooming, elective line construction, staff replacements and so on).
Edval Timetables ( www.edval.com.au ) is the company which (a) supports Edval, and (b) constructs optimal timetables on behalf of schools (consulting). Tim has been working with schools since 1993.
Tim was a key developer of the software used by Brain Resource Company (BRC): www.brainresource.com . BRC deals with vast amounts of data in the form of brain scan recordings. There are parallels between the techniques used to process BRC data and those used to process SMARTSGroup data. Tim no longer works for BRC.
Tim completed his PhD at Sydney University in 1996. The topic was “Barbados: an Integrated Persistent Programming Environment”. “Persistence” is a field of Computer Science that asks the question “what if operating systems and programming languages were to be merged?”. Currently, files are persistent and objects have types, but in a persistent system there are only persistent objects which combine the properties of both. Persistent systems try to get the best of all worlds by unifying disk & RAM, files & objects, compilation & interpretation, routines & programs. Tim’s PhD was heavily about the application of persistence to the programming environment itself. A major contribution of Tim’s PhD was about fine-grained “make” and how it achieves incremental/interactive compilation: in other words, if the “make” algorithm works at the level of a single function (variable, class or macro), then (a) how do we construct & manage dependencies, (b) how do we deal with circularities, (c) how do we manage the source/intermediate/executable data that constitutes the program?