James Noble is Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and a Visiting Professor at Imperial College, London and King's College, London, and a Fellow of the British Computer Society and IT Professionals NZ. Professor Noble has B.Sc(Hons) and Ph.D. degrees, both from VUW, completed in 1997. After leaving VUW, Professor Noble worked in Sydney, first at the University of Technology, Sydney, and then at the Microsoft Research Institute, Macquarie University. Professor Noble returned to VUW in 1999 and was appointed Professor in 2003. Research: Professor Noble's research centres around software design. This includes the design of the users' interface, the parts of software that users have to deal with every day, and the programmers' interface, the internal structures and organisations of software that programmers build and maintain. His research is coloured by a long standing interest in object oriented approaches to design, and topics he has studied range from aliasing and object ownership, design patterns, agile methodology, security, via usability, visualisation and computer music, to postmodernism and the semiotics of programming. Industry: Professor Noble has undertaken research and consulting for companies and agencies including Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Siemens, IBM and the GCHQ.