Bob Sugden

	Position:	Team Leader - Computing Support Service
	E-mail:	bob.sugden ncl.ac.uk
	Telephone:
	Fax:
	Mail:	School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU United Kingdom
	Office:	Room 711 , Claremont Tower

Brief Biography

Bob's research interests encompass the interrelationship of system requirements, design, organisational culture and business processes, via work at CSR and the Sowerby Centre for Health Informatics at Newcastle (SCHIN), where he was Director of Informatics. Prior to joining the University he worked in industry, the health service and local government, including directorships in a number of companies.

Whilst at SCHIN, he co-ordinated the Department of Health Prodigy project providing decision support for clinicians in primary care, working with a multi-disciplinary team. He was responsible for all technical development on Prodigy Release 1, and contributed to the design and evaluation of later research prototypes, which included collaborative work with the Medical Informatics group at Stanford (Protégé). Latterly at SCHIN he co-ordinated the evaluation of the Department of Health pilots for electronic transmission of prescriptions.

At CSR, he co-ordinated the Proteus project which involved British Aerospace, Rolls Royce, CSR, and the universities of York and Loughborough. This project studied development lifecycles and change control processes, with particular reference to the origins and management of requirements instability, including emergent requirements and compositionality problems.

In his career in industry he worked as a requirements analyst, system designer and software engineer. In the course of developing many different applications, he designed a graphical ‘C’ code generator to facilitate rapid application development, a multi-threaded multi-user database solution for Unix (version 7), a system of ‘paging’ to support the development of large machine code programs on mini-computers, and a database transaction logging system for a mainframe environment to support automatic roll-back to the last completed user transaction in the event of system failure. Whilst working in local government, he was Chief Programmer with the team which developed the nationally adopted SOSCIS social services client records system, winning a BCS award for innovation in 1978.

Bob manages the computing support team for the School of Computing Science, which includes 4 Computing Officers and 1 Senior Technician.

Bob is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the British Computer Society

Research Groups

Bob is a member of the [ Dependability ] research group(s)

Related Organisations