I opted for an academic career some nine years ago, and previously I had worked for companies ranging from a small software startup in South Africa to a large European publishing corporation in Amsterdam. I returned to South Africa in 1992 after twelve years abroad -- it has been `interesting' -- many new opportunities and many frustrations.
My academic subject choice fixed on Computing mainly as a result my work experience. It was only after my non-academic activities steered me firmly into being a ``computer person'' that I decided that enjoying Computer Graphics was my aim for a PhD. I read for my PhD at Queen Mary College, London University. The title of the dissertation was ``Complexity in Natural Scenes: A viewer centered metric for computing adaptive detail'' and the degree was awarded in 1989.
I have now realized that I am actually an experimental computer
scientist: a useful but badly supported species. This realization dawned
while at the
CWI
in Amsterdam
(the Dutch National Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science) where I
worked in the Interactive Systems Department from 1988 to 1992. We
tried to understand why the mathematicians did not appreciate what we
were doing and what our needs were. For example, in Computer Science and
especially Experimental Computer Science it is not useful to distinguish
Journal from Conference publications. The tradition has been that the
proceedings of major conferences have archival value and are subject to
the most stringent review process 
.
I feel that our profession of Computer Science has to show its relevance to the aims of the reconstruction and redevelopment of South Africa or face being marginalized as irrelevant. This ties in with the need for a government IT policy.
Since I am now an academic I have been I am involved in a number of functions in the management and administration of the University of Cape Town. The details are probably not relevant except to observe that I have been appointed to a five year term as Head of the Department of Computer Science since 1996.
I am a member of: ACM and of its special interest groups, SIGCHI, and SIGGRAPH; Computer Society of South Africa (CSSA); Eurographics Association; Computer Society of the IEEE. I am a member of Editorial Board of the European Journal ``Computer Graphics Forum'' (official Journal of the Eurographics Association). I have also been very involved in the organization of the Eurographics Workshops on Programming Paradigms for Computer Graphics (formerly called Workshops on Object-Oriented Graphics). I was recently elected to the national executive of the Computer Society of South Africa. I have also been elected to the executive of the National Information Technology Forum (NITF -- http://sn.apc.org/nitf/).