In addition, Professor Shrivastava and the Distributed Systems Research Group set up a spin-off company, Arjuna Solutions Ltd., in November 1998 to provide a commercial exploitation path for their technologies. Professor Shrivastava and his team received the British Computer Society Technical Award in 2000 for Arjuna. The Department's research ranges from the experimental to the theoretical and is structured into five groups covering dependability, distributed systems, parallelism, theoretical computing science and VLSI design. Work in each of the groups is led by one or more senior members of staff, with Professor Brian Randell , as Research Director, ensuring overall coordination. Seminars, an internally-refereed report series, an active visitor programme and the World Wide Web are used to promote interaction between groups and with other institutions.
Emphasis is on the construction of realistic systems.
Of particular interests are the development of transactional workflow and agent technologies in the domain of electronic commerce. The primary interest of the parallelism group is the exploitation of the potential processing power offered by the latest parallel computer systems. The VLSI group's work centers on developing methods and software tools for constructing asynchronous systems and circuits, which promise to become a hardware design technology of the near future, offering modularity, robustness, higher speed and lower power. The boundaries between the areas are deliberately not drawn very sharply, and some members of staff find themselves working in projects in more than one area, just as some research is carried out on an individual basis. The long term importance of, and technical challenges posed by, our current research are such that we expect to continue and indeed hope to expand work in each topic, in each case making due allowance for likely hardware developments and evolving patterns of computer usage.