Prof. Paul Watson
| Position | Professor, Director of the Digital Institute |
|---|---|
| Telephone | +44-(0)-191-222-7653 |
| Fax | +44-(0)-191-222-8232 |
| School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU United Kingdom | |
| Office | Room 912, Claremont Tower |
Paul Watson is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Digital Institute. He also directs the RCUK Digital Economy Hub on Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy. He graduated in 1983 with a BSc (I) in Computer Engineering from Manchester University, followed by a PhD in 1986. In the 80s, as a Lecturer at Manchester University, he was a designer of the Alvey Flagship and Esprit EDS systems. From 1990-5 he worked for ICL as a system designer of the Goldrush MegaServer parallel database server, which was released as a product in 1994.
In August 1995 he moved to Newcastle University, where he has been an investigator on research projects worth over £30M. His research interests are in scalable information management. This includes work on:
- Cloud Computing. Methods for building scalable systems on clouds are explored in a range of projects. The most recent work has been on e-Science Central , a cloud platform for storing, analysing and sharing data. This builds on previous work in the CARMEN which designed and built a virtual laboratory to support neuroscientists. A video of Paul talking about CARMEN at the Google Scalability Conference is here.
- Data-intensive e-science. Interest in e-science is resulting in vast amounts of information being published. He worked on how to publish data through services (e.g. see the Databases and the Grid paper, and the more recent Databases in Grid Applications: Distribution and Locality) so that it can be exploited in distributed applications. From this, and earlier work in parallel query processing, he and his colleagues worked with Norman Paton's group at Manchester on how to integrate data held in distributed database servers, exploiting grid computing to dynamically acquire computational resources as they are needed, e.g. to speed-up queries through parallel joins. This led to the release of the now widely used OGSA-DQP.
Paul Watson teaches teaches information management on the Internet Technologies and Enterprise Computing Msc
Professor Watson is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee.
In August 1995 he moved to Newcastle University, where he has been an investigator on research projects worth over £30M. His research interests are in scalable information management. This includes work on:
- Cloud Computing. Methods for building scalable systems on clouds are explored in a range of projects. The most recent work has been on e-Science Central , a cloud platform for storing, analysing and sharing data. This builds on previous work in the CARMEN which designed and built a virtual laboratory to support neuroscientists. A video of Paul talking about CARMEN at the Google Scalability Conference is here.
- Data-intensive e-science. Interest in e-science is resulting in vast amounts of information being published. He worked on how to publish data through services (e.g. see the Databases and the Grid paper, and the more recent Databases in Grid Applications: Distribution and Locality) so that it can be exploited in distributed applications. From this, and earlier work in parallel query processing, he and his colleagues worked with Norman Paton's group at Manchester on how to integrate data held in distributed database servers, exploiting grid computing to dynamically acquire computational resources as they are needed, e.g. to speed-up queries through parallel joins. This led to the release of the now widely used OGSA-DQP.
Paul Watson teaches teaches information management on the Internet Technologies and Enterprise Computing Msc
Professor Watson is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee.
