John Darlington

Professor John Darlington is a professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College and Head of the Social Computing Group based there. Professor Darlington has a long and distinguished track record both in the development of novel software technologies (functional programming languages, program transformation, functional skeletons, co-ordination forms, component-based application frameworks and Cloud computing) and in the creation and operation of facilities to support applied computation (the Imperial College Fujitsu Parallel Research Centre, the Imperial College Parallel Computing Centre, the London e-Science Centre and the Imperial College Internet Centre).

Professor Darlington’s early research was carried out at Edinburgh University where he was responsible for several pioneering developments in functional programming languages and program transformation.

He moved to Imperial College in 1977 and in 1985 led the team that designed and built the ALICE parallel graph reduction machine which, through a collaboration with ICL, led to the Goldrush Parallel Database Machine. Professor Darlington’s recent work has focused on the development of software and middleware techniques for Grid-based high performance computing and e-Science.

Professor Darlington has had a long-term interest in the power of the Internet to promote radical economic and social change. As early as 1997  he led an EPSRC ROPA project “Electronic Trading: Simulation of New Patterns of Economic Interaction and Transport” that foreshadowed recent developments in Internet shopping, food miles and trading intermediaries. In the e-Science programme he led the influential “A Market for Computational Services” project that pioneered many developments in Cloud Computing and App Stores. As Director of the Internet Centre, he developed several collaborative projects concerned with consumer-oriented Internet services and Internet economics.