university of cambridge
computer laboratory
Ken Moody
Research interests
I retired as Reader in Distributed Information Management on 30/9/2007, staying on as a Principal Research
Associate for the academic year 2007-2008.
I am now fully retired, and no longer able to accept PhD students.
I supervised undergraduates until the Covid Lockdown in March 2020, and continue to be involved in some of
Jean Bacon's research projects, in particular the work on Information Flow Control in the Cloud.
Research interests include distributed database systems, information retrieval,
active applications and access
control (including RBAC for wide-area applications
with federated management domains, also trust-based
access control systems).
Until I retired Jean Bacon and I led the Opera project, which had EPSRC funded research grants for :
Multi-Service Storage Architecture (MSSA), IMP Interactive Presentation support system ;
Active Systems, Global Computation using Events, Oasis Access Control ;
Access Control Policy Management, Business Contract Driven Applications ;
Securing Publish/Subscribe Information Flows (EDSAC21) ;
Information Management for Patient Care (CareGrid) ;
Transport Information Monitoring Environment (TIME-EACM).
A list of selected publications can be found at the Opera Group Web site.
For versions that can be downloaded see the
Opera group publication page.
Selection of past PhD students
- Richard Hayton
- Scarlet Schwiderski
- Mohamad Afshar
- Tim Mills
- Oliver Seidel
- Pawel Wojciechowski
- Wojciech Basalaj
- Alexis Hombrecher
- Niki Trigoni
- András Belokosztolszki
- Yek Luk Chong
- Marco Palomino
- Chris Zhang
- Dave Eyers
- Andy Twigg
- Tomasz Macura
Past seminar and conference presentations
My foils from the talk on John Hine's paper at Middleware 2000 about CIA servers
Foils from a paper at Policy 2001 on expressing access control policy in controlled English
Foils from a seminar about the formal model of the OASIS RBAC system
(given at the University of Hull on 9/10/2002)
Jean Bacon's foils from her talk at Middleware 2001 about the OASIS RBAC system
architecture
Here is the .pdf presentation from a talk in the session "Turning data into Information" at the
CMI Wireless Sensor Networks workshop (given in Cambridge on 2/2/2006)
Research Interests post Retirement
I continue to be interested in wide area applications, data provenance and data protection.
The introduction of GDPR has changed all our lives, particularly as we enter a new world
in which data storage is increasingly Cloud based.
The requirements for GDPR vary from nation to nation, and in particularly there is a significant
difference between the requirements in Europe and in the USA.
Sensors nowadays are gathering much more real-time data than was realistic in the technology
of even 5 years ago, and to satisfy GDPR there is a need to monitor information flow within
the Internet of Things.
I was on the Programme Committee for the Middleware Workshop M4IoT (Middleware for the
Internet of Things) until my 80th birthday, which happened at the first UK Covid Lockdown.
My last participation was when Middleware took place at UC Davis in December 2019 ;
my first visit to Davis, such a friendly area.
The 2020 Conference was at Delft via remote attendance, and that was outside my remit.
Jean Bacon had a recent PhD student, Thomas Pasquier, who developed software for secure
real-time tracking of individual items of information.
In July 2021 Thomas will be joining a research group led by Margo Seltzer at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
I hope that Jean and I will continue to remain in contact with that research team.
E-mail : km10 at cl.cam.ac.uk
