About Us
Flexpansion – Flexible Text Expansion
arose from our founder’s PhD research, aimed at helping people with motor disabilities type faster. Because selecting each letter is slow and tiring, Tim focused on maximising the information extracted from every keystroke. The resulting algorithm outperformed its competitors.
Flexpansion recently took a huge leap forward with the release of Flexpansion for browsers. This means customised word prediction and correction can be embedded in any webpage, with a few simple lines of code. Now web users can type expert, professional text twice as fast!
You can define the exact words and phrases offered within each text box: for instance, just site locations in one, complex technical terminology in the next, then regular language. Form-filling becomes much faster and easier, almost completely removing the chance of typos! Try it now!
Tim saw its potential use on touchscreens, where every user is slowed by the onscreen keyboard, and created the free Flexpansion Android app which offers regular word prediction and autocorrection, as well as fully flexible abbreviation expansion (converting SMS ‘txt spk’ into English).
The company has competitively won financial support from:
Dr Tim Willis – CEO & Founder
BA Linguistics & Phonetics (Leeds University)
MSc Cognitive Science & Natural Language, PhD Informatics, specialising in Computational Linguistics (Edinburgh University)
Tim has extensive experience conducting and applying research in industry and academia, with expertise in grammar, semantics and annotation of large databases of text. He is a Computational Linguistics / Artificial Intelligence expert and entrepreneur, hugely enthusiastic about applying Natural Language Processing to real-world challenges. These include increasing productivity, simplifying information management, chatbots and more.
He has held research posts at Leeds https://www.leeds.ac.uk/ and Lancaster https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/ Universities and was awarded a fiercely-competitive Royal Society of Edinburgh Enterprise Fellowship https://www.rse.org.uk/awards/enterprise-fellowships/ for a year to work on Flexpansion, hosted by Edinburgh University.
“Dr Tim Willis is surely one of the foremost technical experts in this area in Europe.”
– Former VP, O2 Telefónica, & former Chief Scientific Advisor, UK Department for International Trade
Geoff Kell – Business Development
BA, MA Metallurgy (Cambridge University)
Geoff brings a wealth of experience in International Technology Commercialisation, Business Development, Sales and Marketing to Flexpansion, having held Senior Executive positions at Halia Ltd (CEO), Pufferfish Ltd (CEO), Factonomy Ltd (CEO), and Psion Asia Pacific (Managing Director), amongst others.
Malcolm Smith – Lead Developer
BSc Computer Science
(1st class, Edinburgh University)
Malcolm has extensive programming experience and has led development of our Android app from its first beta to its present version. Previous experience includes work for Agilent Technologies (5 years) and Mobile Healthcare Networks Ltd (3 years).
Let’s discuss how we can help you!
- Dr Tim Willis, Edinburgh, UK
- info@flexpansion.com
- +44 (0) 7714 759035