I was appointed a Professor of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1986. I received my Ph.D. in computer science from Cambridge University in 1975.
My research interests are in the areas of computer networking, middleware and fault tolerant distributed computing. The emphasis of my work has been on the development of concepts, tools and techniques for constructing distributed fault-tolerant systems that make use of standard, commodity hardware and software components.

My best known research work is the Arjuna distributed object transaction system (more than twelve years research effort, 85-98), funded by a succession of 5 EPSRC plus 4 EU, and 4 industry grants. This system led to a successful commercial product. You can find out more about it by visiting the pages of the distributed systems group. Other work includes OpenFlow transactional workflow management system, NewTop group communication system for atomic broadcasts and Voltan replicated processing system capable of tolerating Byzantine failures.

Current focus of my work is on middleware for supporting inter-organization services where issues of trust, security, fault tolerance and ensuring compliance to service contracts are of great importance as are the problems posed by scalability, service composition, orchestration and performance evaluation in highly dynamic settings.
in 2005 I received a platform grant from EPSRC for my research group to work on networked computing in inter-organisation settings.

So far I have successfully supervised 23 PhD students (10 of whom are from abroad); many of these students are now in senior positions in industries and academia.

I sit on programme committees of many international conferences/symposia; I am a member of IFIP WG6.11 on Electronic commerce - communication systems. I sit on the advisory board of Arjuna technologies Ltd.