Seminars
Departmental Research Seminars are usually held on Wednesdays at 14:30, with light refreshments from 14:00 onwards. Please check the seminar calendar below for the actual dates and venues.
For further information, please contact Marian Gheorghe (Seminar Coordinator)
Seminars Calendar
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Date TBC, starting at 2.30pm in TBC Light refreshments available from 2.00pm
Speaker: Dr Chris Tofts
So what is a computation theorist doing as an
outsourcing enterprise architect?
Abstract: As labour arbitrage has moved a significant number of IT jobs offshore the remaining technical jobs within the UK tend to be face to face sales focussed. As an example of the type of technical job that remains
firmly grounded near to customers, I will outline how a reasonably large (> $50 million) deal progressed and the role the mathematics of computing systems played in the development of an effective solution. The example
deal is a recent agreement between Deluxe Digital Cinemas EMEA and HP Enterprise Services to deliver movie files to cinemas and is likely to impact a multiplex near you in the next 18 months.
Dr Chris Tofts Biography
Chris had the incredible good fortune to be supervised on his PhD (Concurrency theory) by Robin Milner, followed up by work with Faron Moller (time in concurrency) and Graham Birtwistle (Semantics of OO
Simulation Languages). After a period of using process algebra to prove the properties of individual based models (ant behaviour), Chris further developed work on the use of formal methods to support decision critical
systems support by an Advanced Research Fellowship from EPSRC. Having studied or worked at Edinburgh, Bath, Swansea, Manchester and Leeds, he decided to try the near real world and moved to HP's European Research Centre in Bristol. In HPLB Chris developed an re-implementation of Graham Birtwistle's DEMOS using SML (which meant the acronym didn't have to change) for use as a mathematically well justified modelling framework. In application we found that DEMOS permitted our team to evolve models within the time frame of a workshop and developed it as an approach to reach agreement for requirements in very large outsourcing deals. This model based approach lead to an interest in how complex outsource deals could be negotiated more
effectively, and Chris has some experience of DIIF, Future Firecrest(FCO), NHS IT, FireControl and some UK outsources which might be considered more successful. After completing his move to the commercial world by funding his MBA, Chris and HPLB parted in 2008. After which, he tried to build an outsourcing consultancy for a couple of years, then returning to the large deal negotiation organisation for HP Europe as an Enterprise
Architect. Chris is currently the Chief Technologist for the growing HP account delivering digital movies and he may well be the only non-academic to hold an ScD.