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Gordon Blair is a Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University. We talk about his research at the intersection of distributed systems and ecology, Lancaster’s unique interdisciplinary Highwire Centre for doctoral training, and his innovative approach to structuring his work time, both how he structures his week and how he manages multi-year projects. Find out more at http://www.ensembleprojects.org

Bio

I am a Distinguished Professor of Distributed Systems at Lancaster University with research interest in the fundamentals of distributed systems and also the application of associated digital innovations in support of environmental science. I currently hold a 5-year EPSRC Senior Fellowship in Digital Technology and Living with Environmental Change (DT/LWEC). I am also principal investigator of the Models in the Cloud Project and also previously the Environmental Internet of Things project investigating different aspects of this technological support. I am also Theme Lead in the Data Science Institute for Environment and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Journal on Internet Services and Applications (JISA).

Transcript

Andrew Miller:            So, first of all, thank you for joining me on this podcast. The first question that I ask everyone is, how you got interested in computing or science or research.

Gordon Blair:                I’ve been doing computing for many years. I initially applied to study other areas including mathematics, and then when I first discovered programming, I became hooked, so I shifted to do a full course in computer science. So, I’ve doing that since 1980 right to the very start of some of the more substantial computer science courses, and I’ve loved it ever since.

Andrew Miller:            What is it that really gets you excited about programming or computer science research?

Gordon Blair:                Well, I think first of all, obviously programming is what draws a lot of people in, you know, the joys of programming. I think we all love it when we’ve got time to really dive in and solve a complex problem and write code that solves that problem. Frankly, I don’t have time to do much of that these days because I’m running some very substantial projects, but I look back in fondness to the days when I had time to program. I think on top of that it’s the pace of innovation. The pace is quite remarkable, which means you can’t sit on your laurels, so you have to keep re-inventing yourself, and that’s something I’ve always welcomed throughout my career.

Andrew Miller:            You sort of moved into this area of distributed systems. Was that something that was just sort of a very active area when you were first getting into it, or what caused you to focus on that part of computing?

Gordon Blair:                Well, I started off doing my PhD, and then the initial topic of my PhD was computer networking, and I started programming some device drivers for some early ethernet-like systems, and I suddenly realized that this is fun, but there’s something missing. There’s no way of programming these, what will eventually become very complex distributed systems. So, I became interested in the area that’s now known as middleware, you know, how to offer programming abstractions and programming models that allow you to manage the complexity of the underlying distributed system.

Gordon Blair:                So, it was very early days for the subject, and it was incredibly exciting to be involved as this topic emerged, before the textbooks started to emerge. You know, literally you’re defining the concepts that map out the future of this area.

Andrew Miller:            Right. And you’ve had the experience of actually helping to write a textbook in this area. What was that process like? Did you feel like there was a structure that you could follow?

Gordon Blair:                Well, I joined the textbook Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg, and now Blair in the fifth edition, so the job I had to do was to bring it up to date and bring some new material in, so it was very obvious, looking at the previous edition, that the topic had shifted quite significantly, and new areas such as cloud computing were now quite fundamental to the subject. So, that meant a very significant reorganization of all the material, which I kind of led on.

Andrew Miller:            And, you’re now applying this to the area of environmental science. Does there have to be an application area in order to do good middleware research?

Gordon Blair:                I think if you’d asked me that question 10 years ago, I would say that it’s not necessarily important to that application area. I think if I look back at some of the work I’ve done in the past, I’ve developed middleware abstractions that I thought were generic, and now that I’ve worked in an application domain I realize that it’s so helpful to be embedded in the real world, and to deal with the complexities of the real world. You know, it actually makes for better distributed systems.

Andrew Miller:            In this work do you end up collaborating with environmental scientists, or is this something that you can sort of use their data and work on your own?

Gordon Blair:                No, you need to work very fundamentally with environmental scientists. And if you work with environmental scientists, there’s actually a whole raft of sciences involved, you know, the people that bring a perspective on maybe the chemistry, or the physics, or the biology, so environmental science itself is a heavily cross-disciplinary area. And then I come in as a computer scientist and maybe bring along some other people who are data scientists, and we’ve all got to work together, and that’s really exciting.

Andrew Miller:            How do you go about finding those people? That’s one question people often ask. “Okay, I think that this application area would be meaningful to my research, but I have no idea where to begin.”

Gordon Blair:                Well, I think we’re fortunate that we’ve been able to attract some substantive funding at Lancaster for this area, and hence we’ve been able to recruit postdocs. Then the trick is to attract postdocs who want to work on environmental problems. You know, certainly if you look at areas like data science, there’s other industries competing out there, but I think we’ve got something to offer. We’re actually offering people the chance to work on the grand challenges of our time around a changing climate, and something that matters, that really matters, and they want to do this.

Andrew Miller:            You’ve just started a new multi-year project on data science of the natural environment. I’m interested to hear how that came about and how you feel your work fits into that project.

Gordon Blair:                Well, first of all, we set up a data science institute at Lancaster, and I was the first head of the environment theme. So, because of that, we started drawing together people from different disciplines from right across campus, and we also established relationships with research centers, particularly the Center for Ecology and Hydrology that has a strong presence on our campus as well. And we started small, looking at what we could do together, and then we had an opportunity to go big and to bid for substantive funding. It all came about from dialogue, from getting to know each other, from understanding each other’s problems and perspectives, and then we were in a position to put together what turned out to be a compelling bid to look at, what does data science look like if applied to the complexities of environmental data?

Andrew Miller:            So, what kinds of things do the centers do in order to promote cross-fertilization? It’s not like you just sort of called up the head of the environmental science and hydrology people and said, “Okay, I need five people to be on this project with me.”

Gordon Blair:                You’re absolutely right. The institutes were set up by the university to encourage cross-department and cross-faculty co-operation. That’s what they’re about. I think in Lancaster we’re a good starting point because it’s always felt like a small village. It’s a relatively large university now, but it’s always felt like a place where you could pick up the phone to anyone from any discipline and where you know people right across campus, so that was a great starting point. And we’ve also had quite a number of cross-disciplinary projects in the past, so I think we understand how to make that work well.

Gordon Blair:                How did we make it happen in terms of data science for the natural environment? We had a relatively modest budget, a budget that was used