Malcolm Philip Atkinson | |
---|---|
Born | Cornwall, UK | 13 October 1943
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge (BA 1966) University of Cambridge (Diploma in Computer Science 1967) University of Cambridge (PhD 1974) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer Science e-Science |
Institutions | University of Edinburgh |
Malcolm Phillip Atkinson (born 13 October 1943, Cornwall, UK) is a professor of e-Science, in the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. He is known for his work in the areas of object-oriented databases, database systems, software engineering and e-Science and was the UK's first e-Science Envoy (2006–2011) and the Director of the e-Science Institute and National e-Science Centre, University of Edinburgh.
Atkinson obtained his first degree from the University of Cambridge in 1966, followed by a Diploma in computer science in 1967. After three years research and teaching at Lancaster University he returned to Cambridge and was awarded his PhD in 1974. He then held academic posts in Burma, Cambridge, East Anglia and Edinburgh, being appointed to a senior lectureship at the University of Edinburgh in 1983. He was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania during 1983–84 and was appointed to a professorship in computer science at the University of Glasgow in 1984. [1] He was head of Department of Computing Science from 1986 to 1990, following which he spent nine months on sabbatical at INRIA near Paris working with the O2 group. Atkinson then worked for Sun Microsystems (at SunLabs in California) before moving to the University of Edinburgh in 2001 as Professor in the School of Informatics.
He has more than 100 publications listed on DBLP. [2]
In 1994, he was elected as a fellow [3] in the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
A call for applications for the role of e-Science Senior Research Fellow for the e-Science Core Programme was issued by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in 2005. Atkinson was the successful candidate and started his work as the e-Science Envoy on 1 April 2006 under EPSRC Grant No EP/D079829/1. [4] Consequently, he stepped down as the director of the UK National e-Science Centre. The director post was taken up by Professor Peter Clarke [5] who held it until August 2009.
This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(June 2019) |
He founded the e-Science Institute in August 2001, as a central focus for the e-Science community in the UK. Its mission was to stimulate the creation of new insights in e-Science and computing science by bringing together international experts and enabling them to successfully address significant and diverse challenges.
In January 2007, he appointed Jano van Hemert as Research Leader of the UK National e-Science Centre located at 15 South College Street, Edinburgh, UK. Soon after, they founded the Edinburgh Data-Intensive Research Group. This group became the focus of all e-Science research in the University of Edinburgh. In July 2009, the group joined the Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications (CISA) soon after the group had moved into the Informatics Forum. In September 2010, the group merged with the research group of Prof Dave Robertson, then the Head of School of University of Edinburgh School of Informatics.
Atkinson has pursued a career working as a researcher in database systems in both academia and industry. Among Atkinson's best known achievements are his influential work [6] on Object-Oriented Database Systems, as presented in the Object-Oriented Database System Manifesto (with François Bancilhon, David DeWitt, Klaus Dittrich, David Maier, and Stanley Zdonik), [7] and his work designing OGSA-DAI, [8] [9] a web-service platform for distributed data access, integration and management used internationally in scientific applications. [10] In the early stages of his career, he worked closely with Carol Linden and Neil Wiseman on the Intermediate Data Language. [11] He identified the value of orthogonal persistence at VLDB in 1978 [12] and led the team that built the first orthogonally persistent programming language, PS-algol, in 1980. [13]
With Norman Paton, Vijay Dialani, Dave Pearson, Tony Storey and Paul Watson, he was a member of the UK Database Task Force which published the blueprint for Database Access and Integration Services to foster a wider activity on the formulation of standards for databases and the Grid. [14] From 2003 to 2008 he served on the steering group [15] of the Open Grid Forum as Data Area Chair. He is co-author of the Web Services Data Access and Integration (WS-DAI) Specification. [16]
He has had a long association with the Very Large Database (VLDB) conference series, and was Programme Committee Chair of VLDB 99. [17] He has been instrumental in setting up the XLDB-Europe series of satellite workshops which identify trends, commonalities and major roadblocks related to building eXtremely Large Data Bases (currently referring to databases whose size is 1 petabyte or greater).
This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(June 2019) |
Atkinson was born in East Anglia where his father was in the RAF bomber command, on what is now Stansted Airport. They lived in Wembley for part of the war and after his father was demobbed moved to Flushing in Cornwall where his father managed an Electrical company. His first memory of his home in Cornwall was seeing the sea at the bottom of their garden. He spent a childhood on the beach, bringing seafood home for meals. He had an interest in boats and sailing, first a rowing boat, then an Enterprise sailing dinghy that he built himself and then yachts. On at least one occasion he attempted to rescue people from the sea. He won many prizes as a dinghy sailor. He learned electrics from his father, assisting him connecting farms to the new national grid. They also went down mines and clay-pits to install winding gears. The village school he attended had a single class, and teacher Miss Copp (untrained) was an inspiration to him. She advised his parents that he had the potential to attend the University of Cambridge while young, and also reprimanded him for his early difficulties in writing. He went on to attend Falmouth Grammar, and travelled to school by boat, crossing the Fal Estuary. He contracted rheumatic fever and was unable to attend school for a year during which time he read many science books.
Atkinson got a Scholarship to Cambridge where he read physics. He started in 1962. Having passed everything needed for a first class honours degree by the end of his 2nd year was able to spend his third year on different subjects. He stayed on for a fourth year to do the new Diploma in Computing.[ citation needed ]
He met his first wife Valerie Ross in Cambridge and they were married in 1967. They left Cambridge to start the department of Computer Science at the new Lancaster University and their first daughter, Kirsteen, was born there. Later they had two more daughters, Tamzyn and Janna. Valerie died in 1994. He is married to Kathy Humphry whom he first met in 1978 at the University of Edinburgh where she was a Computing Officer. [18]
Atkinson was instrumental in setting up a Mining Society at the grammar school. He is an avid dinghy sailor and has won many prizes. He once went cruising on a French crabber which was confiscated for smuggling (it had been bought by a customs officer).[ citation needed ]
He won "The Scotsman – Innovator of the Year" Prize in 2002, sponsored by Glenfiddich. [19]
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester is the longest established department of Computer Science in the United Kingdom and one of the largest. It is located in the Kilburn Building on the Oxford Road and currently has over 800 students taking a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses and 60 full-time academic staff.
The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former department of artificial intelligence, the Centre for Cognitive Science and the department of computer science, along with the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and the Human Communication Research Centre.
E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable distributed collaboration, such as the Access Grid. The term was created by John Taylor, the Director General of the United Kingdom's Office of Science and Technology in 1999 and was used to describe a large funding initiative starting in November 2000. E-science has been more broadly interpreted since then, as "the application of computer technology to the undertaking of modern scientific investigation, including the preparation, experimentation, data collection, results dissemination, and long-term storage and accessibility of all materials generated through the scientific process. These may include data modeling and analysis, electronic/digitized laboratory notebooks, raw and fitted data sets, manuscript production and draft versions, pre-prints, and print and/or electronic publications." In 2014, IEEE eScience Conference Series condensed the definition to "eScience promotes innovation in collaborative, computationally- or data-intensive research across all disciplines, throughout the research lifecycle" in one of the working definitions used by the organizers. E-science encompasses "what is often referred to as big data [which] has revolutionized science... [such as] the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN... [that] generates around 780 terabytes per year... highly data intensive modern fields of science...that generate large amounts of E-science data include: computational biology, bioinformatics, genomics" and the human digital footprint for the social sciences.
EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce.
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Gerhard Weikum is a German computer scientist and Research Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he is leading the databases and information systems department. His current research interests include transactional and distributed systems, self-tuning database systems, data and text integration, and the automatic construction of knowledge bases. He is one of the creators of the YAGO knowledge base. He is also the Dean of the International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science (IMPRS-CS).
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Norman William Paton is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester in the UK where he co-leads the Information Management Group (IMG) with Carole Goble.
Wenfei Fan is a Chinese-British computer scientist and professor of web data management at the University of Edinburgh. His research investigates database theory and database systems.
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