Pebbles: People and their Current Personal Workplans

Cambridge UK

  • Dr David Greaves (leader)   Greaves is working on `code reflection', where controlling entities describe their proactive behaviour to the environment before being alowed to join. He is developing a scripting tool chain that includes automated formal verification for system and user constraints. The current chain is called Pushlogic.

  • Prof Jon Crowcroft (advisory)

  • Mr Tope Omitola    Omitola is using planning tools (currently just a model checker but later a generic, pluggable planning interface) as a Rule Based Controller. This can manage a varying population of devices and sensors.

  • Dr Behzad Bastani    Bastani is exploring UML and IDE representations for UPnP and other reflexive ubi-comp software architectures.

  • Mr Atif Alvi is working on a domain checker that ensures all participating application scripts and devices share a consistent set of rules and constraints. He is studying dynamic rehydration of executable scripts and consistency rule in response to changes in a dynamic worldview that is part of a more-stable ontology. Currently his application scripts are written in Pushlogic.

  • Mr Henry Robinson covers global, persistent data storage, including tuple space primitives. He is looking at access and locking primitives as well as semantics applicable to mobile devices where synchronisation between spaces is needed after a re-connect. He has also written a WSDL to Pebble synthesiser/compiler.

  • Mr Ioannis Baltopoulos is penciled in to working on correctness of synthesis of multi-language, multi-component software bundles: eg, synthesis from BPEL into multiple java, asp and javascript fragments.

  • Dr Anil Madhavapeddy - has just completed his PhD in online and static formal validation of legacy software, particularly concentrating on network protocol stacks.

  • Ms Aisha Elsafty and Mr Stephen Kell are in their first year PhD and are considering further aspects of dynamic systems assembly from (hardware or software) components.

  • Ms Myoung Jin Nam - is working on protocol and interface automata synthesis.

  • Arif Zeeshan is penciled in to work on memory-efficient run-time systems that can handle XML and declarative bytecode on embedded processors with limited resources. This work involves compiling our declarative bytecode to ROM-able machine code and developing new parser technology that trades as much RAM for ROM as possible.

  • Dr Daniel Gordon - a Research Associate, was responsible for infrastructure.    He has written a pervasive tuple space distributed system and also the first version of the Pushlogic interpreter. He has constructed a number of the hardware Pebbels listed on this site. Also a GUI for debugging a tuple space.

  • Dr Rob Hague has completed a dissertation on multi-view script editing for home automation. His views included speech, text and the Media Cubes.

    Cambridge USA

  • Prof Umar Saif.
  • Prof Steve Ward - The project originator.
  • Dr. Christopher J. Terman - An associate director of LCS who has been involved with the project from the outset..
  • Hubert Pham: Hubert is an MEng student in our research group, and is the lead-student writing code for the pebbles system.
  • Justin Mazzola Paluska. Justin has recently started thinking about the Planning layer architecture (the Goals layer), and will be devoting a large chunk of his time to the Planning system in the coming months.
  • Jason Waterman - Jason is part of the core oxygen team; he is responsible for keeping all the oxygen demos and toys working throughout the year.
  • Pebbles offer an API and describe themselves to their environment, but do not perform proactive operations on their peers. They are pretty passive really.

    END.       Pebbles Main Page.