Robin Milner, recent work

I am Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, UK. I worked at the University of Edinburgh for 22 years, 1973-1994. Much of my research began there, where I was founding Director of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science (LFCS). From 1995 I have worked at the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge, both before and after retirement. I was Head of the Laboratory for about four years, 1996-1999. ( cv, publications)

This website is about work I have done in collaboration with many others over the past decade. It extends computation theory towards a foundation for informatic structures that will dominate the 21st century. The term `informatics' describes our discipline better than `computer science', as it is now concerned with communicating and informing as well as with calculation. The most long-lived and famous informatic structure is the von Neumann machine, which gave rise to an impressive series of languages and theories. But the von Neumann machine treats primarily sequential computing on a single machine, and does not scale up to explain modern informatic behaviour.

The work reported here has two strands:

• Ubiquitous computing: The first strand urges that to understand Ubiquitous Computing we must make more systematic use of models, which are increasingly common in our discipline. This strand is not mathematical, but proposes how models can form a hierarchy, allowing them to be combined and higher models to explain lower ones.


• The bigraphical model: The second strand is a rigorous mathematical model, based on Bigraphs. It is proposed as a platform on which to build more abstract models, especially for Ubiquitous Computing. It can be considered an abstract machine, called the Ubiquitous Abstract Machine. In contrast with the von Neumann machine, it models the concurrent and interactive behaviour of populations of mobile communicating agents.

Each strand contains citations of the form [n], pointing to numbered references listed at the end.