Biography
I've worked in Computer Science at St 糖心logo since 1991, initially as a research assistant, and then lecturing since 1999. Within the School I've been Adviser of Studies, Admissions Officer and Director of Teaching. At Faculty level I held the roles of Pro Dean Advising and then Associate Dean Students from 2016-22, and jointly the role of Acting Dean of Science for six months in 2019.
Teaching
In 2026-27 I'm teaching on CS1002 (Object-Oriented Programming) and CS5035 (Software Quality). For the latter I conducted an which received some interesting responses.
For current students: here are some for Honours and MSc projects in 2026-27.
Research areas
I was involved in the ESRC-funded project, which aimed to construct a linked genealogy of Scottish historical records, with ,听听and听听at Edinburgh, and听Alan Dearle听and听脰zg眉r Akg眉n in Computer Science at St 糖心logo. This work also included 听and听听at Cambridge, and听听at ANU.
I previously led a work package on linkage methodology within the ESRC-funded听, with听Alan Dearle,听脰zg眉r Akg眉n,听听and听Alasdair Gray.
I'm co-supervisor, with Richard Connor, for , who is working on high-dimensional search.
I'm also interested in distributed systems and programming languages in general.
Previous PhD Students
- 听(2022): handling uncertainty in data linkage, with a focus on using听听for evaluating population linkage approaches. Reported in his thesis .
- 听(2018): investigated user models for managing distributed data, reported in his thesis:听.
- 听(2014): did his PhD work on听. He has published his听听software, which is an adaptive P2P overlay, and听, which is a very light-weight Java听tool that monitors a set of machines and ensures that some given application remains running on them.
- 听(2010): applied autonomic management to distributed storage systems. He looked at autonomic control of maintenance scheduling in Chord, and of replica retrieval concurrency in a simple distributed block storage system. The work is reported in papers at听DANMS 2011听and听Self-Adaptive Networking 2010听and in his thesis:听.
- 听(2003):听addressed the problem of how to configure a software system with a large number of tuning parameters. He developed a tool to automatically run performance tests using various parameter values, so that the best combination of parameter values could be selected. Clearly exhaustive search is impractical due to the combinatorial explosion in the number of possible combinations; this problem is exacerbated by the fact that in a non-trivial system it may take a relatively long time to conduct each test 鈥� in the case study of an industrial mail server, each test took 30 minutes. He used Taguchi鈥檚 Design of Experiments approach to select a very small sub-set of combinations from which reasonable conclusions could still be drawn. The work is reported in a paper at听CDSA 2001听and in his thesis:听.
Second Supervisor
- 听(2018). Thesis:听
- 听(2015). Thesis:听
- 听(2013). Thesis:听
- 听(2012). Thesis:听
- 听(2012). Thesis:听
- 听(2010). Thesis:听
- 听(2006). Thesis:听
- 听(2001). Thesis:听
Previous Projects
- H2O:听autonomic resource-harvesting database
- ASA: secure location-independent autonomic storage architectures
- RAFDA: reflective architecture for distributed applications
- DIAS: evolving sensornet design through co-design
- ACT: automatic configuration testing
- Archware: architecting evolvable software
- GLOSS: global smart spaces
- XBase: generic storage architecture
- orthogonal persistence,听hyper-programming and听linguistic reflection
PhD supervision
- Kamyar听Babazadeh
Selected publications
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Open access
Dearle, A., Kirby, G. N. C. & Akgun, O., 5 Jul 2023, Proceedings of the 31st symposium of advanced database systems: Galzingano Terme, Padua, Italy, July 2nd to 5th, 2023. Diamantini, C., Faggioli, G., Ferro, N., Marchesin, S., Silvello, G. & Tanca, L. (eds.). Sun SITE Central Europe, p. 291-302 12 p. (CEUR workshop proceedings).
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding 鈥� Conference contribution
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Open access
Lasselle, L., Schelfhout, S., Fonteyne, L., Kirby, G., Smith, I. & Duyck, W., 24 Sept 2021, In: PLoS ONE. 16, 9, 18 p., e0257723.
Research output: Contribution to journal 鈥� Article 鈥� peer-review
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Open access
Taalas, P., Gr枚nlund, A., Pag猫ze, J., Coly-Layani, L., Fitzpatrick, M., Minescu, A., Rossi, M., P茅rez-Llantada, C., Villarroya-Gaud贸, M., Herranz, A., Gunnlaugson, G., Svalfors, U., Cullhed, M., H氓kansson, L., Skaletska, Z., Chovnyuk, L., Osypchuk, A., Peddie, C., Kirby, G. & Bretherton, A. & 1 others, , 16 Mar 2020, European University Association, 11 p. (Learning and Teaching Papers; no. 9).
Research output: Working paper
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Open access
Akg眉n, 脰., Dearle, A., Kirby, G. N. C., Garrett, E., Dalton, T. S., Christen, P., Dibben, C. J. L. & Williamson, L. E. P., 2 Apr 2020, In: Historical Methods: a Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History. 53, 2, p. 130-146 17 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal 鈥� Article 鈥� peer-review
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Lasselle, L. S. Z. & Kirby, G. N. C., Sept 2019.
Research output: Contribution to conference 鈥� Paper 鈥� peer-review
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Open access
Dearle, A., Kirby, G. N. C., Lee, W. & Dibben, C., 20 Jun 2018. 1 p.
Research output: Contribution to conference 鈥� Paper 鈥� peer-review
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Open access
Akg眉n, 脰., Dearle, A., Kirby, G. N. C. & Christen, P., 2018, Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 22nd Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2018, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, June 3-6, 2018, Proceedings, Part III. Phung, D., Tseng, V. S., Webb, G., Ho, B., Ganji, M. & Rashidi, L. (eds.). Cham: Springer, p. 89-101 13 p. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); vol. 10939 LNCS).
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding 鈥� Conference contribution
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Open access
Dalton, T. S., Kirby, G. N. C., Dearle, A., Akgun, O. & MacKenzie, M. L., 11 Jun 2018. 1 p.
Research output: Contribution to conference 鈥� Paper 鈥� peer-review
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Akgun, O., Al-Sidiqi, A., Christen, P., Dalton, T. S., Dearle, A., Dibben, C. J. L., Garrett, E., Gray, A., Kirby, G. N. C. & Reid, A., 2 Apr 2017.
Research output: Contribution to conference 鈥� Abstract 鈥� peer-review
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Dalton, T. S., Akgun, O., Al-Sediqi, A., Christen, P., Dearle, A., Garrett, E., Gray, A., Kirby, G. N. C. & Reid, A., 2 Apr 2017.
Research output: Contribution to conference 鈥� Abstract 鈥� peer-review
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