Brian Randell

	Position:	Emeritus Professor, and Senior Research Investigator
	E-mail:	brian.randell ncl.ac.uk
	Telephone:
	Fax:
	Mail:	School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU United Kingdom
	Office:	Room 817 , Claremont Tower
	Disclaimer:	Personal webpages

Brief Biography

My earliest work, during the period 1957-1964 while I was English Electric, was on compilers. This led to the book: Algol 60 Implementation. (Co-author L. J. Russell). Academic Press, London, 1964.

I then joined IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y. where, with an intervening year during 1965-66 in California, I worked on high performance computer architectures (the ACS Project), then on operating systems and system design methodology. During this time, and shortly after I returned to the UK to became Professor of Computing Science at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, I was co-editor of the reports on the two NATO Software Engineering Conferences.

In 1971 I set up the project that initiated research into the possibility of software fault tolerance, and introduced the "recovery block" concept. Subsequent major developments included the Newcastle Connection, and the prototype distributed Secure System. I have been Principal Investigator on a succession of research projects on system dependability funded by the Science Research Council (now Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), the Ministry of Defence, the European Strategic Programme of Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT), and the European Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. Most recently I have performed the role of Project Director for CaberNet (the IST Network of Excellence on Distributed Computing Systems Architectures) and for two IST Research Projects, MAFTIA (Malicious- and Accidental-Fault Tolerance for Internet Applications) and DSoS (Dependable Systems of Systems).

My current computing science research is focussed on Dependability and, to a lesser extent, on the History of Computing.

I was a founder-member of IFIP WG2.3 (Programming Methodology) and am a founder-member of IFIP WG10.4 (Dependability and Fault Tolerance). In 1979 I helped found MARI (Microelectronics Applications Institute) and in 1993 I was involved in setting up the Northern Informatics Applications Agency, both of which flourished and did some excellent work for a number of years.

Publications

A list of publications by Brian Randell is available.

Research Groups

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