 He then wrote his Ph.D. thesis, under the auspices of the Australian National University, on Sakao, a dialect of Espiritu Santo (located in the island group then called the New Hebrides and now called Vanuatu).Following this, he turned his attention towards automatic text manipulation and to digital taxonomy, working from 1985 at the AI research lab of Telecom Australia (Telstra) in Clayton, a suburb of Melbourne.He remained at Telstra until 1998.