Navigation menu

Best Paper and Best Student Paper

The Computing Laboratory scooped the two top prizes at this year's Communicating Process Architectures conference (CPA-2004). This was the 27th conference in the series that started in 1984, initally stimulated by the launch of the INMOS Transputer but now broadened into a rich mixture of theory, tool building, language design and industrial scale application. The CPA conferences bring together leading and new researchers from all five continents, focussing on concurrency as a (and, arguably, the) key engineering principle in the design and implementation of computer systems.

CPA took place this year at Oxford Brookes University at the begining of September. Invited speakers were Bill Roscoe (Head of Computing at the University of Oxford and one of the world's foremost experts, with Tony Hoare and Robin Milner, of concurrency theory and practice) and Michael Goldsmith (CEO of Formal Systems Europe Ltd., who develop and market the most widely used industrial software tools for concurrency safety analysis and functional refinement). The conference is kept small, with only 28 papers in a single stream to maintain its unique binding of theoreticians and practitioners, keeping them in close proximity over two and a half days. The full programme can be found at:

http://cms.brookes.ac.uk/computing/cpa2004/index.php?id=15

Prizes were awarded by the Programme Committee on the basis of excellence both for the technical substance of papers and their presentation at the conference.

The prize for Best Paper went to Alistair McEwan for his paper: "A Calculated Implementation of a Control System". Alistair's paper described the formal refinement of an industrial control system from its initial specification in CSP through to its highly concurrent software implementation (with over 150 different Java/JCSP processes) that worked correctly first time. Alistair is a Research Fellow in the Laboratory, working with Professor Jim Woodcock in the Systems Engineering Research Group (SERG).

Best Student Paper was awarded to Christian Jacobsen and Matthew Jadud for their paper: "The Transterpreter: A Transputer Interpreter". Christian and Matthew's paper presented a rapidly portable and ultra-light implementation of the occam-pi multiprocessing language (that combines the best of Hoare's CSP and Milner's pi-calculus) and illustrated by its application on the Lego 'Mindstorms' kit for improving the teaching of robotics and concurrency. Christian and Matthew are Research Students working with, respectively, Professor Peter Welch (SERG) and Sally Fincher (Computer Education).

So, hearty congratulations to all three above and I'm sure they will enjoy the (rather old and liquid) prizes when they get the chance!