Phillip M. Hallam-Baker

Research

Web related

Payments
Payments systems for the World Wide Web.
Security.
The Web needs a coherent security scheme to support electronic commerce, protection of privacy and prevention of malicious actions
HTML Math Markup.
HTML should allow presentation of arbitary mathematical formalisms including specialised mathematics such as Z and CSP.
Collaborative Work Tools
The Web is currently a static system, information providers and consumers interact only weakly.
Interactive HTTP.
Currently HTTP is an idempotent protocol. HTTP could be extended to replace telnet as a user interface.
Philosophy
Computer science is the operational branch of philosophy in the same way that science is the operational branch of mathematics. In desiging a system we must ask `what are the fundamental principles of this system'. Hermenutics provides a philosophical model for the fundamentals upon which the Web is built.

Other

Parallel Hardware.
Parallel hardware may be faster but currently we lack the software solutions. Parallel languages such as Occam can be much easier to program in than sequential ones such as C.
Language Design.
Software is too hard to write, C++ and such offer only marginal advantages over languages of the 1970s. In many ways they are regressions since the complexity of the languages has increased. Languages developed for a very specific problem domain offer fast programming with high reliability.
Operating system design
No single piece of software has as much influence on the user environment as the operating system. UNIX is certainly not the solution.
Formal Methods
Validate the language design and operating system designs.

Biography

Dr Hallam-Baker has a degree in Electronic Engineering from Southampton University and a Doctorate in Computer Science from the Nuclear Physics Depatment at Oxford University. He was appointed a Post Doctoral Research Associate at DESY in 1992 and CERN Fellow in 1993. He is currently a researcher at the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT.

Recreation