People
Obituary: Robin Milner
Robin Milner’s obituary in The Times described him as “... one of the
world’s foremost theorists of Computer Science”, and he certainly was.
But his constitutive contributions to the subject make that rather like
saying that Locke was an important empiricist or that Einstein was a
leading physicist. Robin was one of a handful of Computer Scientists who
created the mathematical frameworks and methodologies that comprise its
foundations. His impact in several distinct areas led to new research
paradigms and provided the basic conceptual machinery necessary for them
to develop.
Those of us at the University of Essex who have been involved with
the mathematical foundations of Computer Science have never worked
centrally within any of his research areas, but the scope of his
ambition and the reach of his contributions ensured that much of what we
have done has been influenced by these to a greater or lesser extent.
Milner was innovating as long ago as 1970, making contributions in
algebraic approaches to structuring and relating computations that were
among the first research papers I read a decade later. His pioneering
work on type inference was first presented, coincidentally, at the
conference at which I gave my first international presentation. It was
immediately clear that this was highly significant, and it influenced
our work on functional and constructive approaches to program
development for nearly a decade. It was for this that he earned his
Turing Award (Computer Science’s Nobel Prize) in 1991. Robin was also
instrumental in establishing logical frameworks, such as the Logic for
Computable Functions that led to enormous activity on mechanized
approaches to modelling and reasoning about computing systems, a topic
related to much that was subsequently explored at Essex.
Without doubt, however, Robin Milner’s most significant contribution
concerned the formal study of communicating and concurrent systems. His
first theoretical framework, the Calculus of Communicating Systems
(CCS), was first explored by one of his PhD students, Mike Sanderson,
who came to Essex soon after graduating from Edinburgh. Its departure
from standard Automata Theory is based on an insight of breathtaking
simplicity and brilliance: there is an observable difference between a
system that permits an action A followed by the non-deterministic choice
of either B or C, and a system that permits the non-deterministic choice
of either A followed by B or A followed by C. This critical mathematical
insight was revolutionary and established a completely new formal
approach to concurrency and communication.
The system CCS was overtaken by Milner’s second framework, the
pi-calculus, which allows one to study communicating systems in a mobile
setting. This has led to an enormous industry of applications areas as
diverse as intelligent buildings, wireless technologies and even in the
study of complex biological systems.
When he spoke here nearly ten years ago, Robin described the
difficulty of communicating what Computer Science is and what it means.
He spoke about the responsibilities we have for systems of such
complexity that they transcend the capabilities of a single mind, but
are nevertheless deployed in life-critical situations, such as aircraft,
hospitals and nuclear power stations. His arguments for the importance
of foundational mathematical approaches distinguished Computer Science
from Information Technology just as civil engineering is distinguished
from bricklaying. We have sadly lost that voice.
Professor Robin Milner was awarded the title Honorary Doctor of the
University in 2000, and died aged 76 on 20 March 2010 in Cambridge, just
three days after the funeral of his wife Lucy.
Professor Martin Henson
School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering
Obituary: Robert Ferry
Robert Ferry, who died in March aged 29, joined the Hearing Research
Unit in the Department of Psychology in 2004 as a research student.
Having graduated from the University of Sunderland with a computer
science masters degree, Robert produced computer models of how hearing
works for his PhD at Essex. He graduated in November 2008 and his
research was published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America, the world’s leading journal for hearing science.
Since then he had been researching the problems experienced by people
with hearing impairment when trying to follow conversations in noisy
social situations. This work was collaborative with the University of
Sheffield and was published in the same journal.
Robert died following unsuccessful heart surgery to correct a congenital
heart defect. Shortly before his death, the Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announced further funding for his
research, which was also partly funded by Phonak, the hearing aid
manufacturer. He had already begun preliminary work on the testing of a
new hearing aid design.
He was a quiet, easy-to-like individual and an excellent team player who
worked extremely hard in a systematic way. He leaves behind his
long-term partner Heather Grainger, a research student in the Department
of Language and Linguistics, his parents John and Colleen Ferry and his
sister Avril in County Durham. Before his death he appeared to all to be
cheerful and healthy and that is how he will be remembered by all of us
who knew and loved him.
Professor Ray Meddis, Department of Psychology
Also in the printed May edition of Wyvern:
- Honorary graduate celebrates 100th birthday
- Debut novel for academic
