Paul Watson is Professor of Computer Science, Director of the Informatics Research Institute, and Director of the North East Regional e-Science Centre. He also directs the UKRC Digital Economy Hub on "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 £20M. His research interests are in scalable information management. This includes work on:

- 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. Later work developed techniques for dynamically adapting the computation to overcome node failure during long-running queries. Work is now exploring how to generalise the ability to dynamically adapt computations in the presence of changes in user QoS requirements and the availability of compute resources. Recent work has used workflow, as well as distributed query processing, as exemplars to which these techniques can be applied.

- Dynamic Service Deployment. Minimising the movement of data is a key aim in the design of efficient, distributed e-science systems. Database query languages can help with this by encouraging the sending of computation (in the form of queries) to data. However, this may still result in large amounts of data being shipped over the network from databases to remote analysis services. He and his colleagues have been working on a solution that allows web services to be dynamically deployed on compute servers that are close to the database service (for example in the same cluster). This "Active Information Repository" uses the general-purpose dynamic service deployment infrastructure that has been designed in the Dynasoar project.

- e-Science applications. Ideas of how to build data-intensive systems are tested in a range of e-science projects in which there is close collaboration with application scientists to design and build systems that support their science. One of the main projects is CARMEN which aims to build a virtual laboratory to support neuroscientists. A collaboration with York is designing the CARMEN CAIRN, a repository for sharing both data and analysis services. A video of Paul talking about CARMEN at the Google Scalability Conference is here. For information on the other projects, please see the North East Regional e-Science Centre website here.

Paul Watson teaches teaches information management on the System Design for Internet Applications Msc and the e-Business MSc

In total, Paul Watson has over forty refereed publications, and three patents. Professor Watson is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee.