ROMOR (Research Output Management through Open Access Institutional Repositories in Palestinian Higher Education)- EU Project (€1.2m)

Co-Investigator (UoB) David Anderson

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The E-ARK Project - EU Project 620998 (£6m)

Coordination Team: Janet Delve, David Anderson, Clive Billenness, Andrew Wilson (UoB)

Our objective is to provide a single, scalable, robust approach capable of meeting the needs of diverse organisations, public and private, large and small, and able to support complex data types. E-ARK will demonstrate the potential benefits for public administrations, public agencies, public services, citizens and business by providing simple, efficient access to the workflows for the three main activities of an archive - acquiring, preserving and enabling re-use of information.

E-ARK is co-funded by the European Commission under its ICT Policy Support Programme (PSP) within its Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP)

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SEAHA Centre for Doctoral Training in Science and Engineering in Arts Heritage and Archaeology EPSRC EP/L016036/1 (£4.7m)

Co-Investigator (UoB) David Anderson

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology (SEAHA) is an 8-year initiative (2014-2022) to establish an infrastructure to meet challenges set by the heritage sector, industry and government.

Project Partners: University College London, University of Brighton, Oxford University.

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The European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (E-RIHS) (£4m)

E-RIHS will support research on heritage interpretation, preservation, documentation and management. It will comprise: E-RIHS Headquarters and National Hubs, fixed and mobile national infrastructures of recognized excellence, physically accessible collections/archives and virtually accessible heritage data.

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The KEEP Project - EU Grant Agreement ICT 231954 (£4m)

        

At the University of Portsmouth, I co-led the Future Proof Computing Group, which participated in funded research activity worth over £13m and attracted nearly £1m in research funding to the University of Portsmouth

Principal Investigator (UoP) David Anderson

Dr. Janet Delve and I led the Portsmouth KEEP team which included Dr Dan Pinchbeck, Dr Leo Konstantelos, Dr Milena Dobreva and Dr Antonio Ciuffreda.   KEEP was a European consortium which developed emulation techniques for preserving digital objects: text, sound, and image files; multimedia documents, websites, databases, videogames etc. The overall aim of the project was to facilitate long-term, universal access to our cultural heritage by developing flexible tools for accessing and storing a wide range of digital objects.

We addressed the problems of transferring digital objects stored on outdated computer media such as floppy discs onto current storage devices. This involved the specification of file formats and the production of transfer tools exploited within a framework, and took into account possible legal and technical issues.

Although primarily aimed at those involved in Cultural Heritage, such as memory institutions and games museums, the Emulation Services we developed can also serve the needs of a wide range of organisations and individuals because of their universal approach based on porting emulators on a Virtual Machine. In this way we helped create the foundation for the next generation of permanent access strategies based on emulation.

The particular focus of the Portsmouth KEEP team within the wider effort was the investigation of metadata models to describe the technical environment needed for emulation; creating GUIs for both the Emulation Framework, and the Virtual Machine peripheral device manager; developing a transfer tool framework; and dissemination to the Computer Science community.

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Digital Preservation Console Project (Development Study) - JISC £13k

Coordinators David Anderson & Janet Delve (University of Portsmouth)

This small project sought to investigate the extent to which it might be possible to develop an
intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) to enable non‐specialist information professionals to
undertake a variety of preservation and information management tasks with a minimum of
preservation‐specific theoretical knowledge. This ‘Digital Preservation Console’, should offer
considerable opportunity for capacity‐building across institutions to manage, preserve and
strategically discard digital material.

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POCOS (Preservation Of Complex Objects Symposia) - JISC £185k

   

Coordinators David Anderson & Janet Delve (University of Portsmouth)

Over recent years significant progress has been made in understanding the issues involved in preserving complex materials and environments. European projects such as Planets and KEEP have provided tools and techniques which have moved forward the state of the art. The POCOS project delivered a series of 3 symposia at locations across the United Kingdom at which global thought-leaders in research into the Preservation of Complex Objects shared and thereby extended the body of knowledge on this topic. Each seminar was supported by a substantial and innovative dissemination programme to ensure that the maximum long-term value was obtained from the outputs of the seminar. This included the production of a peer-reviewed book of the outputs from each symposium. We also produced webcasts of each symposium in order to increase access for the community. POCOS delivered pathfinder conclusions to the JISC community which contributed to shaping the future direction of research in this area.

Project Partners: University of Portsmouth, British Library, King's College London, HATII (Univ. Glasgow).

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The Newman Digital Archive

I am particularly interested in the development of the electronic digital computer. I begin in 1936 with Turing’s paper “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” and finish, more or less, with Turing’s death in 1954. This captures well most of the significant early developments in the field on both sides of the Atlantic and opens up for study a number of areas which have received little attention elsewhere or have been treated with less rigour than one would hope.

I am focussed on the, largely unknown, contribution to early computing of the Cambridge topologist Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman. This has led me to investigate Newman's attempt to build a computer at the University of Manchester immediately after the end of WWII. My research has been able to show that the conventional history of the period is substantially in error. I have been able to uncover three significant "myths" which underlie much of the dominant discourse in British History of Computing.

The Newman Digital Archive

I am leading the development of a digital archive comprising the papers and memorabilia of the mathematician and computer pioneer M.H.A. Newman. This is a joint project with St. John’s College, Cambridge. The physical archive currently contains approximately 650 items and the digital version is in excess of 3000 scanned pages. When complete this will be the world’s biggest digital archive in the History of Computing. I also worked on the Turing Digital Archive (currently the world’s largest such enterprise).

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Paraconsistent reasoning

This is a way of overcoming the inability of computers to deal properly with inconsistent data by virtue of being based on classical logic and therby subject to the logical principle ex contradictione quodlibet. Since the turn of the 20th century a number of interesting alternatives to classical logic have been propsed offering varying degrees of effectiveness. Unfortunately such success as they have achieved has been purchased at the cost of sacrificing most of the reasoning tools on which systems, in practice, depend.

I have developed a completely novel approach which has resulted in the development of a group of new paraconsistent systems which arguably achieve an optimal weakening of classical logic. The Epsilon family of logics demonstrably outperform all other 4-valued paraconsistent systems. For the first time, a complete replacement for classical logic can now be contemplated.

As an extension of this work I have provided a tree derivation procedure as a refinement of Beth’s semantic tableaux method and Gentzen’s sequent calculus that provides a straightforward means by which truth-functional multivalued and paraconsistent reasoning systems may be automated.

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