Ken Turner - Research Projects
Accent (Advanced Component Control Enhancing Network Technologies)
This project was undertaken from September 2001 to March 2005. It was supported by EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) under grant GR/R31263. Mitel Networks Corporation also supported the project financially and technically. The project worked on an advanced language and supporting mechanisms for enterprises and individuals to specify their policies and preferences for call processing - particularly for Internet telephony. The project developed a call control language for defining user policies, techniques for analysing conflicts in these, and support for policies in an operational environment. The methods and tools support user-friendly descriptions of call control using a policy language called Appel. The project coordinator was Ken Turner as Principal Investigator, with Evan Magill as Co-Investigator. See the separate project description for more details.
This two-year project was undertaken from March 2003 to March 2005. It was supported by the TCS programme of TTI (Technology Transfer and Innovation Ltd.) under grant 4132. The project was joint with Edinburgh Network Technologies Ltd. (edNET, now Lumison). The project focused on call control for softswitches. This is part of a much larger industry drive towards Voice over IP (VoIP, also known as Internet Telephony).
The goal of this work is to develop an abstract notation for decision trees that can be translated into other forms for exploration with a decision tree tool or for formal analysis. (This is entirely unconnected with the ADIT trademark held by Adit Ltd. and with any products or services of this company.) Specifically, AD/IT notation can currently be translated into CGT form (for use with the Clinical Guidance Tree Viewer), into Lotos form (for analysis by Lotos tools), and into XML form (for interchange with other programs). This project is being undertaken by Ken Turner, based on previous work by Richard Bland, Claire Beechey, Dawn Dowding and others on CGTs.
The goal is to develop a method, language and tools for rigorously defining and analysing telecommunications services and features. So far, the work has produced a service description language Anise, a service combination language ANGEN, a service validation language ANTEST, a prototype toolset to support these, and case studies of typical telecommunications services. The major advantage of the approach is architectural consistency, since all the elements of a service have the same status and are described in the same kind of way. Also because the approach is compositional, there is a rigorous foundation on which higher level services can be built. This permits systematic definition, formal description, rapid prototyping and methodical analysis. The architecture is user-oriented in the sense that it concentrates solely on the interactions a user has with services. This project is being undertaken by Ken Turner. See the separate project description for more details.
The goal of this work was to add rigour to the design of digital logic and combined hardware-software systems. A methodology for specification of digital logic in SDL (Specification and Description Language) was elaborated. This methodology supports multi-level descriptions of hardware behaviour and structure, exploiting features of SDL-92. At the higher level of specification, event structures support description of event sequences, set of events, and event patterns with time restrictions. The project was a collaboration between Gyula Csopaki (Technical University of Budapest) and Ken Turner (University of Stirling). See the separate project description for more details.
The goal of this work is to define and support a policy language that is readily used by non-technical people in a variety of novel applications.This is a synthesis of work on the Accent project for control of Internet telephony, the Match project on home care management, and the Prosen project on sensor network management. See the separate Appel project description for more details.
The goal of this work is to define a notation and a tool for defining and verifying specification properties. These may be generic (e.g. freedom from deadlock or livelock) or specific (e.g. a certain type of request always receives a certain type of response). Clove is independent of the application domain, the target language, and the tools used to support this. (However, its implementation is very Lotos-oriented at present.) Declarations are translated inyo C header files for the CADP toolset. Properties are translated into Regular Alternation-Free Mu Calculus (RAFMC). Verification demonstrates that either that properties hold or they do not. Failures are interpreted in a simple tree-like form, thus avoiding the user having to be familiar with the target language. The principal designer was Larry Tan under the supervision of Ken Turner. See the separate project description for more details.
This three-year project was undertaken from October 2000 to September 2003. The goal of this work was to define a method for specifying, analysing and testing the functional and performance characteristics of radiotherapy equipment. The project used LOTOS (Language Of Temporal Ordering Specification) as the specification language. The project studied the characteristics of radiotherapy machines, with a view to formally modelling them and then deriving rigorous tests to evaluate their correct behaviour. The project was by Qian Bing under the supervision of Ken Turner. Funding was provided by the National Computing Centre. See the separate project description for more details.
The goal of this work is to define a notation and set of tools for graphical specification and analysis of features. Cress is designed as a flexible notation for describing and combining features. It is graphical in order to improve its attractiveness to an industrial audience. Automated tool support has been developed to check the correctness of diagrams and to translate them into various (formal) languages. The toolset is portable and can run on a variety of platforms with a variety of front-end diagram editors and back-end target languages. Cress was initially loosely based on the Chisel notation developed by BellCore for describing telephony features. The project is being conducted by Ken Turner, with significant contributions from Larry Tan> on web/grid service composition, and from Dean McMenemy on VoIP/CPL services. See the separate project description for more details.
This three-year project was funded by ESRC under grant RES-149-25-1066 from February 2008 to January 2011. The project was a collaboration between the Universities of Stirling and Glasgow. The goal of this work was to use e-science techniques such as metadata, portals, workflows, grid computing and security to support data management in social science. The approach was evaluated on datasets drawn from occupational analysis, educational qualifications, ethnicity and immigration, social care and mental health. The Principal Investigator was Paul Lambert of Applied Social Science at Stirling. The participants in Computing Science at Stirling were Ken Turner and Simon Jones (Co-Investigators), Guy Warner, Larry Tan and Jesse Blum (Research Assistants).
This project was undertaken from February 1997 to January 2000. The goal was to develop a method for formally specifying and analysing computer systems irrespective of how they are realised in hardware and software. The outcome was an integrated design method, with accompanying tools where these are not already available. The project was undertaken by Ji He (Helen Ji) under the supervision of Ken Turner. See the separate project description for more details.
This project was undertaken from April 1998 to March 2000, funded by the British Council and the Ministerio de Educación y Cultura under grant 2246. The goal was to support the development and uptake of the formal language E-LOTOS (Enhancements to LOTOS) that was being standardised internationally by ISO. E-LOTOS is intended for the precise specification of computing and telecommunications systems. Case studies were undertaken using E-LOTOS in areas such as communications protocols, distributed systems and hardware-software co-design. The project was conducted by a team in Stirling led by Ken Turner and by a team in Madrid led by Tomás Robles. See the separate project description for more details.
This project was funded by EPSRC under grant GR/M00275. The main goals of the project are to act as a UK forum on engineering telecommunications services, to bring together UK industrial and academic researchers in this field, to foster discussion of related problems and solutions, and to disseminate know-how so as to improve UK competitiveness. The project was undertaken by a consortium of UK telecommunications companies and Universities, with the University of Stirling as coordinator. See the separate project description for more details.
This three-year project was funded by EPSRC under grant J/17555 from May 1993 to October 1996. The main activities were the specification of an architectural semantics for ODP (Open Distributed Processing) in LOTOS and Z, specification of an ODP Trader, and specification of type management for ODP in LOTOS and Z. The project was undertaken at Stirling by Richard Sinnott under the supervision of Ken Turner. The project was managed by British Telecommunications PLC. See the separate project description for more details.
This eighteen-month project was funded by ESRC under grant RES-149-25-1015 from October 2005 to March 2007. The project was undertaken at Stirling by Larry Tan, under the supervision of Paul Lambert as Principal Investigator and Ken Turner as Co-Investigator. Other Investigators included Vernon Gayle (University of Stirling), >Richard Sinnott (National E-Science Centre), Ken Prandy (University of Cardiff), Erik Bihagen (Swedish Institute for Social Research, Sweden) and Marco van Leeuwen (International Institute for Social History, Netherlands). The Geode project was concerned with the technologies behind the distribution of occupational information within the social science research community. The Geode project used e-Science and Grid technologies to facilitate access to occupational information. See the separate project description for more details.
This eight-year project was supported by SFC under grant HR04016 from November 2005 to October 2013. The project was undertaken by research teams at the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling (lead partner). The academic team was complemented by a large number of external partners. Ken Turner was the project Technical Director and Principal Investigator at Stirling, working with Louise Bellin (original Project Manager) and Kevin Swingler (later Project Manager), Evan Magill and Mario Kolberg (Co-Investigators), Feng Wang and Julia Clark (Research Fellows), and Liam Docherty (Research Student). Match focused on technologies for care at home. The project developed specialised expertise in home care networks, lifestyle monitoring, speech communication, and assistive technology (devices for disabilities). The intended end users were those at home with long-term illness, physical or mental impairment. See the separate project description for more details.
The goal of this work is to support validation of BPEL-based services in conjunction with Mustard. The project is being conducted by Ken Turner with significant contributions from Larry Tan on web/grid service validation. See the separate project description for more details.
The goal of this work is to define a notation and a tool for specifying and validating test scenarios. Scenarios may have behaviour that is sequential or parallel, deterministic or non-deterministic, and dependent on features or choices. Acceptance tests (things that must happen) and refusal tests (things that must not happen) can also be specified. Mustard is independent of the application domain, the target language, and the tools used to support this. Tests are translated into the target language of the system being validated and are executed in this environment. Test results are interpreted in terms of the Mustard notation, thus avoiding the user having to be familiar with the target language. The project is being conducted by Ken Turner with significant contributions from Larry Tan on web/grid service validation and verification. See the separate project description for more details.
The goal of this work was to develop policy support for communications using the H.323 protocol stack (e.g. as used in Microsoft's NetMeeting). The project was undertaken by Huang Tingxue under the supervision of Ken Turner and Stephan Reiff-Marganiec. Support was provided by the Sino-British Fellowship Trust from April 2003 to April 2004. See the separate project description for more details.
This three-year project was funded by EPSRC from October 2005 to November 2008. The project was undertaken by research teams at the Universities of Lancaster (lead partner), Kent, Strathclyde and Stirling. Ken Turner was the Principal Investigator at Stirling, working with Evan Magill (Co-Investigator), Xiang Fei (Research Fellow), and Gavin Campbell (Research Student). The academic team was complemented by a number of industrial partners. Prosen studied proactive control techniques, particularly for large-scale distributed systems such as sensor networks used in wind farms. See the separate project description for more details.
This eighteen-month project was funded by EPSRC under grant H/80811 from August 1992 to March 1994. The main activities were to develop a method with computer support for turning functional requirements into formal specifications written in LOTOS, and to explore how to explain formal specifications to different levels of users. The project was undertaken by Paul Gibson and Ashley McClenaghan under the supervision of Ken Turner. See the separate project description for more details.
This three-year project was funded by British Telecommunications PLC under grant ML 634559 from April 1995 to March 1998. The main activities were formal specification and analysis of quality of service for distributed applications. The project was undertaken by Daren Reed under the supervision of Ken Turner. See the separate project description for more details.
This project is funded by the Digital Health and Care Institute from November 2015 to July 2016. The main activity is developing the prediction of emotional state using physiological monitoring. The project is being undertaken by Ken Turner and Evan Magill in conjunction with external collaborators. See the separate project description for more details.
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