Infrastructure From Edge to Centre — How are we going to use Information Technology (IT) successfully for the future? After 30 years of Internet, we still struggle with a few basic issues, perhaps because we keep redefining the goal posts for success — greater speed, greater scale, greater scope, greater mobility. There have been many proposals…

All abroad! — With the sense of a future in academia collapsing in 2007, I needed to escape the toxic alley I’d wandered into. I was hitting bottom from work, from a personal breakup, and from battling my own shortcomings. …

Darker times afoot — A premonition from an unlikely spirit guide confronted me on a trip to Vancouver in 2006. Intending to catch up with the Networking EMANICS community, I set forth to the NOMS 2006 Networking conference in Vancouver, Canada, but on arrival a terrible flu befell me and I squandered the event…

Give and take in the world of agents — There’s an unspoken bond between researchers. You don’t criticize the tenets of the field in which you work; you don’t try to do anything to undermine the fragile status quo. It’s sometimes a hard promise to keep. It’s the opposite of what scientists should do, if they keep their promise…

Research travails — Research is something that goes beyond work. It’s a statement of identity. When people ask me “Do you have kids?”, in my mind I want to say: “Yes, they’re just not human”. My kids are my books, scientific papers, software, pieces of music, work. Things that came from me, that…

Getting more personal — Boom, boom, boom. Smoke and sweaty bodies. Nightclub, Chelsea, Manhattan, New York. It feels like the inside of an old Victorian brick warehouse. The roof is curved like the arch of a steampunk railway bridge. On the other end of my nose is a churning sea of people, dancing face…

From monographs to novels — When I was younger, and I still had time to read for pleasure, I was wowed and amazed by the novels of science fiction John Brunner — Stand On Zanzibar (about over-population), The Sheep Look Up (about pollution). How do you write a novel about over-population, about pollution? …

How the web became a detachable buoyancy device — Shortly after my move from physics to computer science, the World Wide Web became mainstream. The clock struck mid 1990s, and the starting pistol was fired on the Information Age. Before this, the World Wide Web had been a pretty fledgling curiosity for sharing content from CERN, with browsers like…

Travelling and becoming a computer scientist — News agencies love to make us fear other places and peoples, because they focus on the actions and words of their governments. Show me a country that really loves its government and I might not want to visit it. Before seeing with my own eyes, I believed that Norway was…