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Compendium software is used to map dialogue and information around socio-technical dilemmas with economic, public policy, educational and health impacts. In Australia, urban planners attribute stakeholder buy-in to dialogue mapping with Compendium. In the USA, a deadlocked environmental planning process used it to make progress, while Southern California Edison use it to manage environmental policy. In the NHS, it can map therapeutic group dynamics, while in Germany, a journalist summarised a medical ethics case to parliament with it. More than 170 companies and individuals have endorsed Compendium, a striking application being to control Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) at work.
Modern processor architectures (networked multi/many-core nodes), together with society's expectation of evermore-complex applications, require fluent mastery of concurrency. To enable this mastery, in the last two decades our group has taught, researched and developed fundamental notions of concurrency, new programming languages (occam-pi, and the KRoC toolset), libraries (JCSP, CCSP, C++CSP, CHP), runtime systems (the KRoC/CCSP multicore scheduler) and tools based on formal process algebra (Hoare's CSP, and Milner's pi-calculus).
Our work has had impact in providing new mechanisms for software development in a number of sectors such as chip design, large-scale real-time systems, formal interfaces and testing and the space industry. Testimonials supporting this are available from a variety of industrial and commercial sources (NXP Semiconductors, Big Bee Consultants, Philips Healthcare, 4Links Ltd. and Microsoft Research Cambridge). The breadth of impact of the work is evidenced by download statistics, as well as by third-party contributions to libraries and documentation.
Impact: The underpinning research resulted in an innovative Worst-Case Execution time (WCET) analysis technology now called RapiTime, which was transferred to industry via a spin-out company, Rapita Systems Ltd. The technology enables companies in the aerospace and automotive industries to reduce the time and cost required to obtain confidence in the timing correctness of the systems they develop. The RapiTime technology has global reach having been deployed on major aerospace and automotive projects in the UK, Europe, Brazil, India, China, and the USA. Key customers include leading aerospace companies such as: [text removed for publication]; as well as major automotive suppliers: [text removed for publication]. Since 2008, Rapita has won export orders to China worth over [text removed for publication]. From 2008/9 to 2011/12, the company's annual revenues have more than doubled from [text removed for publication] to over [text removed for publication]. As of August 2013, Rapita employs [text removed for publication] people at its offices in York and Cambridge.
Graph-theoretic and mathematically rigorous algorithmic methods developed at the University of Hertfordshire have improved the applicability of compiler technology and parallel processing. A compiler developed in the course of a ten-year research programme at the university has been successfully applied to a number of commercial problems by re-purposing the research tool. NAG Ltd has adapted the tool into a commercial product [text removed for publication]. Numerous applications of the mathematical methods (such as type-flow graphs used conjointly for correctness and optimisation) have been deployed by industry (including SAP, SCCH, German Waterways Board) working closely with the university.
In 1997 Professor David MacKay of the University of Cambridge Department of Physics developed Dasher, a software accessibility tool for entering text by zooming through letters displayed on a screen. Dasher has since transformed computing for tens of thousands of individuals unable to use a normal keyboard, and is recommended by many charities involved in assistive technologies, such as the European Platform for Rehabilitation network. Since 2008, Dasher has been downloaded over 75,000 times and has been ported to smart phones, making use of input devices such as tilt sensors and joysticks. Linking Dasher's information-efficient text generation from gestures or gaze direction to text-to-speech or real-time-text output channels has made Dasher an ideal component of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems which address digital exclusion.
Memory violations are a major cause of security breaches and operational flaws in today's software systems. Proving memory safety was traditionally a core challenge in program verification due to the high complexity of reasoning about pointer manipulations. Researchers at Queen Mary and Imperial jointly produced breakthrough algorithms for automatically reasoning about pointers, enabling highly-scalable automatic verification for industrial code. These techniques resulted in the industrial program analysis tool INFER developed by Monoidics Ltd, and used by customers across the world. The verification algorithms developed at Queen Mary and Imperial were also incorporated in Microsoft tools used to secure Windows device drivers.
Bath research on the design of multi-agent software systems governed by norms and institutions has directly influenced the development of the essential business systems of an internet-based trading company, and been instrumental in their success.
The Book Depository (BD) was founded in 2004. In 2005, their Chief Technical Officer, Emad Eldeen Elakehal, sought the expertise of Julian Padget in the Department of Computer Science at Bath, and began a part-time PhD, working on the application of normative frameworks to the design and implementation of business systems. Elakehal has applied these principles in the design and construction of two key subsystems of BD's software infrastructure: the catalogue maintenance system (live since 2006) and the price checker and setter system (since 2008). Their effectiveness has underpinned the growth and success of the company by providing robust software implementation of business processes that adapt to changing market conditions. The company's turnover grew from £24M to £120M from 2008 - 2011, and continues to grow. The software systems enabled this growth to take place with no increase in the operations team's manpower, and now handle a catalogue of over 8 million titles, from 120 suppliers, all available within 48 hours to customers on the Book Depository's own web site or via Amazon's marketplace: all Amazon book customers have seen offers of books generated by this software. The software underpins BD's award-winning business, a unique offering in the book retail sector which attracted takeover by Amazon in 2011. BD's Managing Director states that "without the agent/norm based technical systems not one of the business' USPs could have been effectively realised."
Impact: Economic gains
The Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) made substantial contributions to the development of MPI and produced some of its first implementations; CHIMP/MPI, and CRI/EPCC MPI, for Cray T3D and Cray T3E supercomputers.
Significance: MPI is the ubiquitous de-facto standard for programming parallel computers. Software written to use MPI can be transparently run on any parallel system, from a multi-core desktop computer to a high-performance supercomputer.
Reach: Hardware vendors including Cray, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft all support MPI. The world's 500 most powerful supercomputers all run MPI. Hundreds of companies use MPI-based codes.
Beneficiaries: Hardware vendors, software vendors, scientific, industrial and commercial ventures. Specific examples include Cray Inc., [text removed for publication] and Integrated Environmental Systems.
Attribution: This work was led by Professor Arthur Trew and Dr Lyndon Clarke.
The spin-out company CSM Ltd. was set up in 1991 to commercially develop Durham research on program transformation. Up until 1999, this company (which in the mid-90's became Durham Software Engineering Ltd. and subsequently Software Migrations Ltd.) and researchers at Durham University developed the FermaT Workbench: an industrial-strength assembler re-engineering workbench for program comprehension, migration and re-engineering. In 1999, Software Migrations Ltd. relocated to St. Albans and now has an extensive list of national and international clients. All its products (software and services) are built on the FermaT Workbench and has generated considerable revenue with this revenue strongly expected to rise steeply in the near future.
From 1995 Professor Munjiza's research at QMUL has led to the development of a series of algorithms which can predict the movement and relationship between objects. These algorithms have been commercialised by a range of international engineering and software companies including Orica, the world's leading blasting systems provider (via their MBM software package), and the software modelling company, Dassault Systems (via their Abaqus software). Through these commercialisation routes Munjiza's work has generated significant economic impact which is global in nature. For example, his predictive algorithms have enabled safer, more productive blast mining for Orica's clients — in one mine alone, software based on Munjiza's modelling approach has meant a 10% increase in productivity, a 7% reduction in costs and an annual saving of $2.8 million. It has also been used in Dassault Systems' Abaqus modelling software, which is the world's leading generic simulation software used to solve a wide variety of industrial problems across the defence, automobile, construction, aerospace and chemicals sectors with associated economic impact.