Research interests and networking

The combination of some significant problems provides a very rich body of investigation, some deep theoretical problems, and some important research results passed on to industry.

• Unreliable communication - messages sent over physical media are often garbled or lost. Programming (sequential and parallel) assumes reliable communication and this must be provided. Alternatively, if we accept that errors do occur, can we still manage to communicate with data loss (consider Mars probes, mobile communication, satellite TV and digital telephony)?

• The support and study of temporal and spatial decoupling of work patterns and communities. Sociologists are interested in communication and observation at a distance.

• Privacy and security (they are not the same thing) - industry's desire for electronic commerce and invasive marketing have driven the fields of authentication (and anonymity?) and encryption, and governments' desire for surveillance has driven the fields of identity and communication hiding.

• Parallel programming - as seen in Hadoop and Map/Reduce models of processing distributed, the OpenMP and MPI parallel frameworks, distributed shared-memory, and "big-data", Unlike sequential programming, writing, modelling and imagining the execution of parallel programs is very difficult. Parallel "activities" which must be resolved in parallel programs include distributed resource sharing and deadlock prevention.