Mike brings his wide experience in academia, business, research and consulting to the assignments he takes on for Nial Systems Limited. Most recently Mike has been the technology architect for the eContact project, an inter-jurisdictional Canadian government project to provide citizens with easy access to government services. His role in the project has been to design the overall architecture and to build a proof-of-concept prototype that demonstrates that natural language processing of citizen queries given in colloquial language can be matched against questions provided by the agents who interact with citizens daily. The prototype proved effective enough for the project to move forward to a Pilot stage. Mike remained the technology architect during the initial Pilot development and acted as a technology advisor to the project until it was phased out in 2005.

Prior to the eContact project, Mike led the research effort at Esponsive Communications, where as Chief Scientist, he developed the core algorithms used in their product offering - Esponsive Online. This work involved the development of proprietary algorithms based on computational linguistics, text analysis and heuristics to extract concepts in documents, to identify common concepts across a set of documents, and to make judgments on the relevance of a document to a person's interests.

Mike is the President of Nial Systems Limited. He continues to use and support Q’Nial for server-side web programming in interactive prototypes of complex scenarios. Q'Nial was used at Esponsive for experimental research on the algorithms and to implement the prototypes that demonstrated the feasibility of Esponsive Online. It was also used for the proof-of-concept prototype for eContact and for several internal prototypes that have assisted the development of the Pilot version.