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
- Croquet
- Politics
- Public speaking
- UNIX hating.