Prof David De Roure Career History
David graduated in Mathematics with Physics at the University of Southampton in 1984 and commenced a career in medical electronics, working for Sonicaid Ltd on the design of a product for computing cardiac output from Doppler and ECG. Originally introduced to computer algebra systems and the Lisp programming language through a relativity class, he took an opportunity to pursue PhD studies in the design of distributed programming languages under David Barron at Southampton. He became a lecturer in 1987 in the newly formed Department of Electronics and Computer Science, working in the functional programming team (under Peter Henderson) and with the Concurrent Computation Group (Tony Hey), developing software for transputer systems in several European projects.
In 1992 he took sabbatical leave at INRIA-Rocquencourt to continue research on the semantics of distributed programming languages (with Christian Queinnec). He returned to Southampton to join the Multimedia Systems group under Wendy Hall where he designed Open Hypermedia systems in the emerging Web architecture, developing the ‘Distributed Link Service’ with Les Carr. He held an ESRC Fellowship in the Analysis of Large and Complex datasets programme working in the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge with David Spiegelhalter on the predecessor to WinBUGS Bayesian Analysis software. Throughout this period he was responsible for the research computing infrastructure and support team in the growing department in Southampton. In 1997 he took sabbatical leave at IBM Hursley Laboratories, designing workflows for music analysis and visualisation, and MIT’s Project Mac with Gerry Sussman and Hal Abelson where he helped develop a simulator for amorphous computing. On return he took a position as a long term research fellow at British Telecom Laboratories in Martlesham Heath, based in the Future Networks Testbed.
David was appointed to a chair in Southampton in 2000 and was closely involved in the UK e-Science programme, including the CombeChem pilot project (led by Jeremy Frey in Southampton) and the myGrid pilot project (led by Carole Goble in Manchester), and was Co-Director of the Southampton Regional e-Science Centre. He also bridged two major Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations: Equator (led by Tom Rodden in Nottingham), focusing on ubiquitous computing and the intersection of digital and physical worlds, and Advanced Knowledge Technologies (led by Nigel Shadbolt in Southampton) which conducted important work in Semantic Web and open data. During this period he created and directed the Centre for Pervasive Computing in the Environment (under the DTI NextWave programme), bringing together his skills in pervasive computing, distributed systems and Semantic Web. He also launched the myExperiment social website for scientists with Carole Goble. As chair of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute he oversaw its successful completion and the development of the new UK Software Sustainability Institute.
In 2009 David was appointed to the role of UK National Strategic Director for e-Social Science for the Economic and Social Science Research Council and moved in July 2010 to the Oxford e-Research Centre as Professor of e-Research, where in addition to his national role he is responsible for the Digital Humanities team and the University’s Digital Humanities @ Oxford project. Principally focused on developing the e-Research Centre, he continues his personal research in computational musicology, building on his background in multimedia and computation, in Web Science in conjunction with the Oxford Internet Institute, and in advancing digital scholarship. In 2011 he was elected as a Research Fellow of Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a member of Wolfson College.