DIAS: People

Investigators
		Prof Joe Sventek heads the Embedded, Networked, and Distributed Systems research group in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. His interest in the network and system management of environmental sensor networks is of direct relevance to DIAS; he is also acting as overall project coordinator.
		Dr Alvaro A. A. Fernandes is a Senior Lecturer and a member of the IMG group co-led by Prof. Paton. His principal research interests to the aims of DIAS are in distributed query optimization and processing. In close collaboration with Prof. Paton, he is also currently active in research on both adaptive query processing and on spatio-temporal databases. Both these areas are of relevance to his overall responsibility for the application data management dimension in DIAS.
		Prof Norman W. Paton co-leads the Information Management Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He works principally on databases and distributed information management, including applications in the life sciences. His activities on adaptive, distributed query processing have contributed to the development of advanced data management middleware such as OGSA-DAI, OGSA-DQP and myGrid. In DIAS, he will contribute expertise to the design and implementation of database languages for querying sensor networks.
		Dr Alice Miller is a lecturer in the Formal Analysis Theory and Algorithms research group at the University of Glasgow. She has worked in the field of formal verification for 10 years. Her interests include model checking, specifically the use of advanced mathematical methods to verify large or infinite systems. She has developed techniques to verify systems of any size using a combination of abstraction and induction, and has been involved in the development of software for symmetry reduced model checking. In the DIAS project she will advise, oversee and implement aspects of the formal specification and verification of the different dimensions involved in the project. She will work closely with Paolo Ballarini (below).
Research Assistants
		Ixent Galpin is a Research Associate in the Information Management Group at the University of Manchester. He completed an MSc in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Manchester in 2005, during which he extended the Tripod spatio-temporal DBMS with advanced temporal querying facilities. Previously, he was employed at Reuters as Software Specialist for 3 years.
		Dr Paolo Ballarini is a Research Fellow in the Formal Analysis Theory and Algorithms research group at the University of Glasgow. His research interests are focused on formal techniques for systems' verification/specification, inclduing probabilistic model-checking, stocastich Petri Nets and temporal logic.
PhD Students
		Christian Brenninkmeijer is a PhD student in the Information Management Group at the University of Manchester. He completed an MSc in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Manchester in 2005, during which he extended OGSA-DQP to included parameterised queries. He also has a MSc from Imperial College were he continued to work for one year with Dr. Yike Guo's Inforsense group on data mining of web data.
		Alexandros Koliousis is a member of the Embedded, Networked, and Distributed Systems (ENDS) group in the Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. He received his MSc in Advanced Computing Science from the University of Glasgow in 2005. His research interests include network and system management of large-scale distributed systems.