MARK HATTON received a BSc(Hons) degree in Software Engineering from Birmingham University in 1988 and then moved directly into industry, beginning his career with Baxter Healthcare where he worked in process engineering for four years designing, developing and deploying several pharmaceutical manufacturing and logistics systems. During this time he gained a solid background in pharmaceutical manufacturing, regulatory control, quality management and process engineering. The majority of this work involved a spending a great deal of time with Customers / Clients analysing existing systems, understanding Customer requirements and actively monitoring live trials and systems testing.

Mark joined BT Research Laboratories (now Adastral Park) in 1992 where he worked predominantly in the area of Intelligent Networks contributing to many successful research projects. During this time he also ran his own successful business / consultancy specialising in process / quality improvement systems and regulatory compliance for healthcare manufacturing environments. He counted some of the largest and most successful pharamceutical companies in the world amongst his clients.

In 1999 he joined Microsoft Research as one of the first Research Software Development Engineers at the lab. During his time at MSR his broad skill base, Customer oriented focus and adaptability allowed him to contribute successfully in a number of areas including Information Retrieval, Hardware Systems and ultimately Machine Learning and Perception. It was in this latter period that he teamed up with Mike Tipping and in 2001 formed the games research group that now continues as the Applied Games group. The goal of this group was to bring advanced machine learning techniques into mainstream games development both to improve traditional "artificial intelligence" (AI) and to create innovative game-play mechanisms. Two years of research and development efforts culminated in the release of the highly regarded Forza Motorport which used our ground breaking Drivatar technology.

In early 2006 Mark left Microsoft to form Vector Anomaly with Mike Tipping.