People
Jean Bacon and Ken Moody have led the Opera group from its creation in the 1990s. Jean retired from her post of Professor of Distributed Systems in the Computer Laboratory in 2010, continued as a Director of Research until the end of 2013 then continued on a Voluntary Research Agreement. Ken retired from his post as Reader in Distributed Information Management in 2009.
This page lists people involved with ongoing research projects and past members of the group. 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.
Current Opera Group Members
Jean Bacon is an Emeritus Professor in the Computer Laboratory and an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College. She is PI on the CloudSafetyNet project and co-PI on the CLaw project: MCCRC (Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Centre).
Ken Moody retired as a Reader in Distributed Information Management in the Computer Laboratory in 2009. He is a Life Fellow of King's College. He has ongoing research involvement in the TIME project and in aspects of database and middleware research, in particular relating to electronic health records.
Jat is a Research Associate on the PAL project. He holds a PhD from Cambridge and a BSc from the University of Western Australia.
Thomas is an RA on the CloudSafetyNet project and also a PhD student under Jean Bacon's supervision, working on Information Flow Control for Cloud Computing.
Name: Brian Shand
CRSID: bns21 Web Page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~bns21
Brian Shand is a senior researcher at NHS Public health England (formerly ECRIC), a CL Visiting Research Fellow, a collaborator on the CloudSafetyNet project and previously on the SmartFlow project. He was formerly a PhD student working on trust-based contracting policies, under the supervision of Prof. Jean Bacon. His research focused on trust-based middleware for distributed computational services. Thesis Title: "Trust for resource control: Self-enforcing automatic rational contracts between computers" - TR-600.
David Eyers is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Otago New Zealand and a CL Visiting Research Fellow on CloudSafetyNet. He was formerly a Research Associate on the SmartFlow and CareGrid projects. 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 undergraduate education was completed at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia - a BSc/BE (hons).
Alastair is a Lecturer in the Computer Laboratory and a Fellow of Robinson College. He is involved in TIME-EACM and its follow-on projects.
Former Opera Group Members
Name: Peter Pietzuch
CRSID: prp22 Web Page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~prp22
Peter Pietzuch is a Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London and collaborator on the SmartFlow project. He was formerly a Ph.D. Student in the Opera group, working on the design of infrastructures for event systems and access control management in such systems. His PhD was funded by QinetiQ, Malvern.
Thesis Title: "Hermes: A Scalable Event-Based Middleware" - TR 590.
Name: David Evans
CRSID: de239 Web Page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~de239
David Evans was a Research Associate on 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, 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.
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 received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge in 2006. Previously, she spent several years with IBM (US, Japan, Italy and UK) working on various networking products.
Pedro was a PhD Student in the Opera Group supervised by Prof. Jean Bacon. He did his Diploma and MSc degrees in ECE at the University of Porto, Portugal. Currently he holds a position on the School of Science - CS Dept - University of Porto. His research interests are Sensor/Actuator networks and protocols; Middleware for sensor networks; Network security and Identity Management.
Julien was a PhD Student in the Opera group under the supervision of Prof. Jean Bacon, and member of Jesus College. He 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.
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 and Sam Staton.
Name: Agathoniki (Niki) Trigoni CRSID: at263
Niki Trigoni is a lecturer in Oxford. She holds her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, on semantic optimization of OQL queries using a set of association rules.
Name: Alan Abrahams CRSID: asa28
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.
Name: Andrew Twigg
CRSID: adt28 Web Page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~adt28
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.
Name: Scarlet Schwiderski
Scarlet is at Microsoft Research cambridge. She was formerly 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".
Name: András Belokosztolszki
CRSID: ab374 Web Page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ab374
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.
Name: Nathan Dimmock
CRSID: ned21 Web Page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ned21
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.
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.
Name: David Ingram CRSID: dmi1000
David Ingram works for Google UK. He was a Senior Research Associate on the TIME-EACM project. He has experience with real time operating systems, low latency networking, ubiquitious computing, graphics, HCI and augmented reality. He designed and implemented an event-based publish/subscribe middleware SBUS as part of the TIME-EACM project.
Name: Sriram Srinivasan CRSID: ss607
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.
Name: Daniel Cvrcek
CRSID: dc352 Web Page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~dc352
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.
Name: Samuel Kounev CRSID: sk507
Samuel Kounev was 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.
Name: Adrian Friday
Adrian is in the Computer Science Department at Lancaster University. He visited the CL in 2009. His research focuses is 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.
Name: John Hine
Professor John Hine was an EPSRC Visiting Fellow 1999 - EPSRC GR/M37592 - from the University of Victoria, Wellington, New Zealand. More information can be found here.
Name: Luis Vargas CRSID: lcv24
Luis Vargas is at Microsoft Redmond, US. He was a PhD student supervised by Prof. Jean Bacon. His research focused 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.
Name: Dan O'Keeffe CRSID: do244
Dan was 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.
Name: Minor Gordon CRSID: mg404
Minor Gordon was a PhD student in the CL. He holds a BSc from Oklahoma State University in Tulsa, OK, USA and a MSc Diplom from the Technische Universitaet Berlin in Germany. He is a member of Jesus College.
Name: Tomasz Macura CRSID: tm289
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.
Name: Salman Taherian
CRSID: st344 Web Page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~st344
Salman was a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. 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.
Name: Arasnath Kimis CRSID: ak319
Arasnath Kimis was a PhD student in the group. He received his first degree, MEng in Information Systems Engineering, from Imperial College His interests are in event architectures and messaging platforms. He was funded by the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust and a Commonwealth Scholarship.
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 was funded by the Cambridge Overseas Trust.
Name: Lavr Burin CRSID: lb345
Lavr Burin was a PhD student in the Opera Group working with Dr Ken Moody. He 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.
Name: Steve McKellar CRSID: sm364
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.
Name: Mark Spiteri
CRSID: mds24 Web Page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mds24
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.
Name: Andrei Serjantov
CRSID: aas23 Web Page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~aas23
Andrei Serjantov was a PhD student interested in anonymity which distributed and in particular peer to peer systems can provide. Previously, he 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.
Former Opera Group Members (no photos available)
Name: Chaoying Ma CRSID: cm
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.
Name: Alexis Hombrecher CRSID: ah264
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.
Name: Dave Halls
Thesis Title: "Applying Mobile Code to Distributed Systems" - TR 439.
Name: Guangxing Li
Thesis Title: "Supporting Distributed Realtime Computing".
Name: Huang Feng
Thesis Title: "Restructuring Virtual Memory to Support Distributed Computing Environments".
Name: John Bates
Thesis Title: "Presentation Support for Distributed Multimedia Applications" - TR 341.
Name: Kerry Rodden CRSID: kr205
Former PhD student 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.
Name: Mohamad Afshar
Name: Noha Adly
Thesis Title: "Management of Replicated Data in Large-Scale Systems".
Name: Oliver Seidel
Thesis Title: "Metadata Support for Connecting Application Components Asynchronously".
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.
Name: Richard Hayton
Thesis Title: "An Open Architecture for Secure Interworking Services".
Name: Sai Lai Lo
Thesis Title: "A Modular and Extensible Network Storage Architecture" - TR 326 - Distinguished dissertation award.
Name: Stephen Childs CRSID: soc20
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".
Name: Sue Thomson
Thesis Title: "A Storage Service for Structured Data".
Name: Tim Mills
Name: Tim Wilson
Thesis Title: "Improving the Performance of Storage Services".
Name: Walt Yao CRSID: wtmy2
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. 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.
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.
Name: Wojciech Basalaj
CRSID: wb204 Web Page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~wb204
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.