People
This page contains a list of the current members of the Opera group. There are also lists of members who have graduated with their PhDs from the group and a list of other past members of the group.
Each person's name is followed by their Computer Laboratory CRSID.
The easiest way to contact someone is by e-mail. Computer Laboratory e-mail addresses are of the form CRSID@cl.cam.ac.uk or firstname.lastname@cl.cam.ac.uk.
Academic Staff
Jean Bacon is a Professor in distributed systems in the Computer Laboratory and a Fellow of Jesus College. She leads the Opera Research Group with colleague Ken Moody.
She is the author of Concurrent Systems - Addison Wesley - and editor in chief of IEEE Distributed Systems Online.
Ken Moody is a Reader in distributed information management in the Computer Laboratory and a Fellow of King's College. He leads the Opera Research Group with colleague Jean Bacon.
Research Assistants, Associates, Visitors and others
Alastair is an RCUK Academic Fellow and faculty member at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He is also a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge.
David Evans is a Research Associate attached to the TIME-EACM project, examining issues of security and privacy in transport monitoring middleware and applications.
He holds a PhD from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, where he explored resource management strategies for the delivery of rapidly changing, frequently requested information.
He has also worked on software infrastructures for unobtrusive monitoring of frail individuals, and with the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies on web system scalability and data centre resource provisioning.
His masters research covered digital rights management.
His research interests include performance modelling and analysis of distributed and operating systems, privacy and trust, and novel applications for low-overhead virtualisation.
David Eyers is currently a Research Associate working on the CareGrid project. He has recently completed work on a grant entitled "Business Contract Driven Application Development and Control". Those grants involve use of declarative policy representation and conflict resolution.
His Ph.D. thesis documented research into active distributed policy-based access control systems, including the integration of work-flow and other dynamic constraints into Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), policy visualisation, and the messaging infrastructure to support such systems.
His overall research interests are far broader, including specific interests in networks, web and database technologies.
His undergraduate education was completed at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia - a BSc/BE (hons).
Eiko is an EPSRC Research Fellow, working on the Project: Data Driven Network Modelling for Epidemiology (EPSRC), Behavioural Modelling Project (ESRC), the Haggle Project (EU-FP6) and the SOCIALNETs project (EU-FP7).
Her research interest is an innovative distributed system over mobile/wireless network including data-centric asynchronous communication. She has received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge in 2006. Previously, she has spent several years with IBM (US, Japan, Italy and UK) working on various networking products.
Jat is a PhD student in the Opera group under the supervision of Pr Jean Bacon. He holds a BSc from the University of Western Australia, and is now researching after several years in industry developing medical and judicial support systems.
His research interests are in the area of maintaining privacy policies in distributed environments.
Eiman is a researcher working on the Cambridge Mobile Sensing project.
Research Students
Julien is a PhD Student in the Opera group under the supervision of Pr. Jean Bacon and member of Jesus College.
Julien holds a Diplôme d'Ingenieur from the EPITA Grande École and a Master from the Université Pierre & Marie Curie obtained through a joint-degree programme.
His research interests include operating systems design and large-scale fault-tolerant distributed systems, especially peer-to-peer file systems.
His research is funded by the Cambridge European Trust, EPSRC and Microsoft Research.
In his spare time, when not working on educational projects, he enjoys playing football and tennis for his College as well as rowing and playing cricket from time to time.
Ben completed his Computer Science degree at the University of Cambridge in June 2008, as a member of Churchill College. He is currently studying for a PhD in the Computer Laboratory, supervised by Jean Bacon.
Pedro is a PhD Student in the Opera Group supervised by Pr. Jean Bacon. He did his Diploma and MSc degrees on ECE on University of Porto, Portugal.
Currently he holds a position on the School of Science - CS Dept - University of Porto. He is now taking a teaching leave from University of Porto to pursue his PhD goals on Body Sensor Networks.
His research interests are Sensor/Actuator networks and protocols; Middleware for sensor networks; Network security and Identity Management.
Alumni
Niki Trigoni is interested in semantic optimization of OQL queries using a set of association rules.
She holds her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.
Alan Abrahams was a PhD student and, later, a postdoctoral Research Associate on the Microsoft-funded project contract-driven e-commerce automation.
He has taught at the Department of Operations and Information Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and at the Department of Informatics, University of Pretoria.
His industrial consulting experience includes the founding of an electronic commerce start-up in Cape Town, and work with Dimension Data plc on e-commerce development-process improvement.
He holds a Bachelor of Business Science degree with Honours in Information Systems from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a PhD - July 2003 - from Cambridge.
Alexis Hombrecher's research interest is in the area of federated event architectures.
He did his undergraduate degree at Stanford University and Birmingham University, UK. Before coming to Cambridge he spent one year at the Institute for Information Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, doing research in the area of distributed information systems.
András Belokosztolszki was a PhD student in the group. He received his M.Sc. and B.Sc. in computer science and mathematics from the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.
His interests include distribution, access control policies, role-based access control and active databases.
He was funded by the Overseas Research Students Scheme and a King's College studentship.
Thesis Title: Role-Based Access Control Policy Administration - TR 586.
Andrei Serjantov was a PhD student interested in anonymity which distributed and in particular peer to peer systems can provide.
Previously, he has spent a year at Yale University and received a BA from the University of Cambridge. He is a member of Queens' College.
Thesis Title: On the anonymity of anonymity systems - TR-604.
Description
Name: Andrew McNeil
Andrew McNeil originally came to Cambridge in 1993 to do a Maths Degree. After graduating he saw the error of his ways and changed to Computer Science. He has left the lab to work in Silicon Valley.
His research involved working on applying events to the Home Area Network. His interests include distribution, operating systems, compilers, and putting a processor in anything with more than 2 buttons.
Andy was a PhD student working on trust in distributed systems, in particular on the SECURE project developing a computational notion of trust, and competitive distributed on-line algorithms for reasoning about it.
His interests are broad but something like computational complexity and distributed systems is a good approximation.
Arasnath Kimis was a PhD student in the group. His received his first degree, MEng in Information Systems Engineering, from Imperial College in 1999.
His interests are in event architectures and messaging platforms. He was funded by the Cambridge Commenwealth Trust but is now under the Commonwealth Scholarship which is administered by the Foreign and Commenwealth Office.
Brian Shand was a PhD student working on trust-based contracting policies, under the supervision of Dr Jean Bacon. His research focused on trust-based middleware for distributed computational services.
Before this, he investigated distributed objects for image processing applications, for an MSc at the University of Cape Town. His work was partly funded by ICL, now part of Fujitsu.
Thesis Title: Trust for resource control: Self-enforcing automatic rational contracts between computers - TR-600.
Dr. Chaoying Ma was a research associate from June 1996 to September 2001. She has a BEng from BUAA, Beijing, China. After getting a PhD - on Global Naming - from the Computer Lab, Cambridge University, she worked on CSCW and computer augmented environment at Rank Xerox European (Cambridge) Research Lab - former EuroPARC -, on video-on-demand systems with Octacon Ltd - a UK company which is now called Onyx Internet - and taught Multimedia Systems at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
She is interested in Distributed Computing, Middleware Design and Implementation, Event Technology, CSCW and Multimedia Systems.
Description
Name: Chris Zhang
Chris Zhang was a Ph.D. student in the Opera Group. His research interests include peer-to-peer system, distributed computation, content distribution and trust and risk management in such systems.
He received his first degree from the Department of Computer Science, at University of Essex.
He is funded by the Cambridge Overseas Trust.
Daniel Cvrcek was a Research Associate in the OPERA group. He spent several recent years working on various issues related to Public Key Infrastructures, Electronic Signature, applied cryptography, and security of HSMs.
While with the Opera group he worked on the risk side of a framework designed by the SECURE project.
Description
Name: Dave Halls
Thesis Title: Applying Mobile Code to Distributed Systems - TR 439.
Gavin Bierman was a University Lecturer and Fellow of St John's College. He moved to Microsoft Research Cambridge in March 2004.
His interests include object databases, the ODMG standard, and the use of semi-structured data in software systems.
Description
Name: Guangxing Li
Thesis Title: Supporting Distributed Realtime Computing.
Description
Name: Huang Feng
Thesis Title: Restructuring Virtual Memory to Support Distributed Computing Environments.
Description
Name: John Bates
Thesis Title: Presentation Support for Distributed Multimedia Applications - TR 341.
Description
Name: John Hine
Professor John Hine was an EPSRC Visiting Fellow 1999 - EPSRC GR/M37592 - in the Opera group.
More information can be found here.
Kerry Rodden is interested in user interaction with multimedia information retrieval systems, with a particular focus on assessing the usefulness of content-based image retrieval techniques, as well as relevance feedback, and collaborative filtering.
Her work was partially funded by AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, where she collaborated with the DART multimedia information retrieval group.
She spent two summers in Switzerland, firstly in 1994 as a Summer Student on a WWW project at CERN, Geneva, and then in 1997 as an intern with Matthew Chalmers in the HCI group at UBS Ubilab, Zurich.
She has a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.
Description
Name: Lauri Pesonen
Lauri Pesonen was a PhD student interested in securing event-based middleware and peer-to-peer protocols.
He received his MSc from the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, in early 2001 and has worked for various IT companies beforing coming to Cambridge to do his post-graduate studies.
Lauri is a member of Wolfson College.
Mark D. Spiteri graduated in Computing and Physics from the University of Malta in 1994, and later that year joined the Department of Computer Science and A.I. as a research assistant.
As a Commonwealth Scholar, he moved to the University of Cambridge in 1995 where he completed his PhD in 2000.
He is carrying out research in distributed multimedia environments, collaborative systems, and paradigms for storage and retrieval of active information.
Description
Name: Mohamad Afshar
Nathan Dimmock was a Ph.D. student in the Opera group. After completing a degree in Computer Science at Cambridge in June 2001 he then decided to spend 6 months trekking round Canada, working in coffee shops in return for free coffee and generally avoiding anything that looked like a computer.
Having completed his caffeine detox programme, he researched computational trust-based approaches to access control with applications in the field of pervasive computing.
Nathan was a graduate student at Jesus College and was funded by Marconi plc.
Description
Name: Noha Adly
Thesis Title: Management of Replicated Data in Large-Scale Systems.
Description
Name: Oliver Seidel
Thesis Title: Metadata Support for Connecting Application Components Asynchronously.
Description
Name: Paweł Wojciechowski
Paweł T. Wojciechowski received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge in 2000. While he was a member of the Opera group, he designed and implemented Nomadic Pict, a distributed programming language for the Internet.
After completing his Ph.D. degree, Paweł continued his research work as a Postdoctoral researcher at the Theory and Semantics Group.
In 2001, he moved to Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne - EPFL in Switzerland. In 2005, he joined the faculty of the Institute of Computing Science at Poznań University of Technology in Poland.
More information can be found here.
Peter Pietzuch was a Ph.D. Student in the Opera group. His research interests include the design of infrastructures for event systems and access control management in such systems.
He received an undergraduate degree from Cambridge University and his final year project investigated ways to use ODL as an event type definition language with the Cambridge Event Architecture.
His work was funded by QinetiQ, Malvern.
Thesis Title: Hermes: A Scalable Event-Based Middleware - TR 590.
Peter Sewell is a Royal Society University Research Fellow. His research is mainly on the foundations of distributed programming, looking at problems of distributed infrastructure, security, failure, and modularity in the context of language design, implementation and semantics.
This work builds on operational semantics, process calculi - especially various pi calculi - and type systems.
Description
Name: Richard Hayton
Thesis Title: An Open Architecture for Secure Interworking Services.
Description
Name: Sai Lo
Thesis Title: A Modular and Extensible Network Storage Architecture - TR 326.
Stephen Childs is interested in the integration of multimedia technologies into operating systems. His thesis was in the area of file systems, and aims to provide a simple way for applications to use efficient storage of multiple types of data (e.g. continuous media, textual and numeric data, etc.).
He was funded by an ICL Studentship and has a B.Eng. from the University of Limerick, Ireland.
Thesis Title: Disk Quality of Service in a General-Purpose Operating System.
Steve McKellar was a Ph.D. Student in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. His research interests include distributed algorithms and the application of Opera's event work for event correlation and network management.
Description
Name: Steve Pope
Thesis Title: Application Support for Mobile Computing - TR 415.
Description
Name: Sue Thomson
Thesis Title: A Storage Service for Structured Data.
Description
Name: Tim Mills
Description
Name: Tim Wilson
Thesis Title: Improving the Performance of Storage Services.
Walt Yao earned his PhD from the Opera group in 2003. His research was on implementing an access control architecture in an open, distributed environment based on CORBA.
He received a B.Eng. from the Department of Computer Science, at University of Edinburgh, where he did a project at building a distributed object system providing supports for object mobility and remote object invocation.
He later worked for the Department on a BT-sponsored project before joining the group.
Description
Name: Wei Wang
Wei Wang was a Ph.D. student in the Opera group. His research is implementing a policy store under the Access Control Policy Management grant.
He was funded by the Cambridge Overseas Trust and EPSRC.
Wojciech Basalaj was a Ph.D. student in the group. His topic of research was Object Database Visualisation, i.e. applying Multidimensional Visualisation and Multivariate Analysis techniques to object databases.
He received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of London in 1997. During his undergraduate studies he undertook a one-year industrial placement at AT&T Wireless Communications Products - now Lucent Technologies Wireless.
He was born and brought up in Swinoujscie, a small town in the North-West of Poland, on the coast of Baltic Sea and near the border with Germany. He received his primary and secondary schooling there.
Samuel Kounev is a PostDoc Research Fellow in the Opera group. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Darmstadt University of Technology and a Master degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Sofia.
Samuel has extensive experience in the areas of software performance engineering, modeling and evaluation of distributed systems, benchmarking and capacity planning.
Description
Name: Adrian Friday
Adrian's research focuses on system support for mobile and ubiquitous computing.
In the past he has worked on open distributed systems support for collaborative mobile applications, service discovery, context-aware mobile guides and smart environments and situated displays.
Most recently he is working on developing a systems platform to support the deployment of a situated public display network on campus: e-Campus.
Description
Name: Scarlet Schwiderski
Scarlet is a lecturer in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Scarlet did her PhD at the Computer Laboratory a few years back under the supervision of Ken Moody.
Thesis Title: Monitoring the Behaviour of Distributed Systems.
Luis Vargas is a PhD student supervised by Pr. Jean Bacon. His research focuses on possible synergies between database and messaging technologies to share information and coordinate processes.
His interests span the areas of databases, data dissemination, event architectures, and transaction processing.
Before Cambridge, he spent a few years at GE Mexico/US as technical leader of funds transfer systems. He holds a BSc in computer science from ITC, Mexico and a MSc in Distributed Systems from Essex University, UK.
He is a member of Jesus College.
Minor Gordon is a PhD student in his first year. His research interest is routing in publish/subscribe systems.
He holds a BSc from Oklahoma State University in Tulsa, OK, USA and a MSc Diplom from the Technische Universitt Berlin in Germany.
He is a member of Jesus College.
Tom Macura was a PhD student and member of Trinity College. His undergraduate degrees are, magna cum laude, in Mathematics and Computer Science, from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
His professional interests are in Image Analysis, Machine Learning, and Content Based Image Retrieval of biological images.
He carries a National Institutes of Health-University of Cambridge Health Science fellowship and a secondary appointment at the National Institute on Aging, Laboratory of Genetics, Image Informatics and Computational Biology Unit that is headed by Dr. Ilya G. Goldberg where he works on the Open Microscopy Environment.
In his spare time, he enjoys unicycling and plays waterpolo and rowing for his college.
Salman is a PhD student under the supervision of Pr. Jean Bacon. Holder of BAI - Computer & Electronic Engineering - and BA degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, his research interests cover a wide scope of Adaptive, Dynamic, Agent-based and Self-Configurable Computing.
He is a member of St. John's College.
David Ingram is a Senior Research Associate in the Opera group. He has experience with real time operating systems, low latency networking, ubiquitious computing, graphics, HCI and augmented reality.
He is now working on designing and implementing an event-based publish/subscribe middleware as part of the TIME-EACM project.
Dan is a PhD student interested in the general areas of sensor networks, event notification systems and complex event processing.
He received his B.A. degree in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin in 2003.
His work is funded by Marconi and the Cambridge European Trust. He is a member of St. John's College.
Lavr Burin is a PhD student in the Opera Group working with Dr Ken Moody.
He has graduated magna cum laude from St Petersburg State University, Faculty of Mathematics & Mechanics, Software Engineering Department.
He has a strong background in a broad range of mathematical subjects and foundations of computer science. His current research interests are from database theory, data integration, and information systems.
Meanwhile, Lavr has devoted a significant part of his time to exploring Russian culture and history of St Petersburg and currently he learns more about the British culture, its nature and traditions.
Sriram Srinivasan is a PhD student advised by Prof. Jean Bacon and Prof. Alan Mycroft. He comes back into academia after a 18-year stint in industry.
He is interested in programming languages and in concurrent, transactional, distributed, reliable systems, of which he.s written a few. He was one of the principal designers of the Weblogic application server. His bestselling book, Advanced Perl Programming has ceased messing up unsuspecting minds.

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