Dr HUGO R. SIMPSON MA PhD CEng FIEE FBCS

CAREER SUMMARY

Hugo Simpson graduated from Cambridge University in 1957 with First Class Honours in the Mechanical Sciences Tripos ("Fast" Course) and Honours in the Electronics Specialist Option. He returned to the University from 1962 to 1964 to obtain his PhD degree for research carried out in the Control Systems Group.

The first part of his professional career was spent as an Engineering Officer in the Royal Air Force where he achieved the rank of Group Captain, at one time commanding the main avionic repair base at RAF Sealand (1900 personnel). His RAF career also included considerable computing and software research and development, covering radar data processing, command and control systems, satellite signature analysis, system design methods, compiler compilers, and real-time operating systems. The more significant results of this work are published in papers in the open literature and in Royal Radar Establishment reports. He is co-originator of Mascot, a Ministry of Defence software design method which evolved from his work with real-time systems.

In 1980 he joined British Aerospace Dynamics with responsibility for building up an internal real-time software design capability. This grew to about 100 professional staff in 1990, at which time he became the Executive Technologist for Digital Information Processing, and with more time now to concentrate on the development of the theory and and practice of real-time systems. His work has produced original (and published) results for asynchronous communication mechanisms, real-time system design methodology, and the classification and formal underpinning of interaction protocols. He has a strong interest in the achievement of high levels of of integrity in distributed multi processing operating environments

Dr Simpson is a Fellow of both the Institution of Electrical Engineers and The British Computer Society. He has been a member of the IEE Accreditation Committee, and of Industrial Advisory Committees for Electronic Engineering at the University of York. and at King’s College, London. Until June 2000 he was a member of the Steering Committee for the BAe Dependable Computing Systems Centre and also served on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on the Engineering of Computer Based Systems. From time to time he sits on IEE Membership panels. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Newcastle and at Kingston University.

Following his retirement in June 2000, Dr Simpson continues to work part-time with British Aerospace Dynamics. His work concentrates on the theoretical and practical techniques needed for the development of dependable, embedded, distributed, real-time computing systems, and the dissemination of some important new results in this field through the publication of papers in the open literature. He plans to write a badly needed book on real-time networks. He is an Honorary Consultant and researcher for COHERENT (COmputational HEteRogEneously timed NeTworks), a joint Newcastle - Kingston research project started in July 2001.

Updated 19/3/2004