Jonathan Peter Bowen

London South Bank University | LSBU · School of Engineering

This paper provides an overview of Jifeng He’s academic achievements while at Oxford University in the UK, and later in Macau and Shanghai, together with his legacy internationally. He was an important researcher on the European ESPRIT ProCoS projects and Working Group on “Provably Correct Systems”. Subsequently and most notably, this led to collab...

I am a member of the History of Mathematics Forum which meets periodically at Queen’s College in Oxford to discuss work in progress relating to mathematical history in general, including some computer science. For example, I gave a talk on Alan Turing’s connections with Oxford, which resulted in feedback from Chris Hollings, co-organizer of the For...

In September 2023, it is planned to celebrate the 80th birthday of Prof. Jifeng He, an important contributor to the field of formal methods. We provide a brief biography (Bowen & Zhu, 2023) followed by a description of the Festschrift volume that is to be published (Bowen et al. 2023). The associated symposium will be held in hybrid mode. We intend...

Museums on the Web: Exploring the past for the future Chairs: Karin de Wild Nadezhda Povroznik This panel will shed light on the histories of museums on the Web. The advent of on-line technologies has changed the way museums manage collections and access them, shape exhibitions, and build communities and participation. Aspects can be found in histo...

In the paper, we explore the notion of global digital citizenship, particularly with respect to museums and cultural heritage organizations. In this perspectives study, we explore current examples of how museums can adapt to the tenets of global digital citizenship necessary to navigate and participate in increasingly interconnected digital worlds...

This paper looks at key elements of global culture that are driving a new paradigm shift in museums causing them to question their raison d’être, their design and physical space, recognizing the need to accommodate visitor interaction and participation, and to reprioritize institutional outcomes and goals reexamining their priorities. As heritage s...

A previous article in FACS FACTS (Bowen, 2022) reviewed the book Combinators: A Centennial View by Stephen Wolfram (2021), surveying a century of combinatory logic since it was first formulated by the Russian logician Moses Schönfinkel (1888-1942) (Wolfram, 2020; Bowen 2021). The book under review here takes a rather shorter historical perspective,...

Sir Tony Hoare FRS is one of the leading computer scientists in the world. This book celebrates Hoare’s life and work as the 1980 winner of the ACM A. M. Turing Award, widely considered to be the nearest equivalent to the Nobel Prize in computer science. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has decided to produce a series of books on Turin...

This paper looks at key elements of global culture that are driving a new paradigm shift in museums causing them to question their raison d'être, their design and physical space, recognizing the need to accommodate visitor interaction and participation, and to reprioritize institutional outcomes and goals reexamining their priorities. As heritage s...

This Oral History of Museum Computing is provided by Jonathan Bowen, and was recorded on the 1st of March, 2021, by Paul Marty and Kathy Jones. It is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY), which allows for unrestricted reuse provided that appropriate credit is given to the original source. For the recording o...

The rapid global rise of immersive digital experience at exhibitions and museums sheds light on the intense need for deep engagement with art and the emotions that it projects and the stories it tells. With social isolation imposed by COVID, during more than two years and counting, human digital identity is evolving as digital experience moves to t...

This paper takes a landscape view of archives practice now operating in a sea of human digital behavior, interacting with computational systems embedded in real and virtual life, part of our complex global digital ecosystem driving cultural and social change. We envision a new computational archives framework, designed to be user-centric, in ways t...

This paper surveys certain Communities of Practice (CoP) in the field of formal methods for software engineering, especially with respect to state-based notations, using personal knowledge and experience. The multiple communities involved with formal methods are examined here as related CoPs. In this context, the CoPs are open communities encouragi...

Online self-presentation plays a vital role in online dating applications due to online filtering and contacting the desirable potential partners through presentational clues. Applying qualitative data collected from young female participants and the theoretical Two-Component Model of Leary & Kowalski (1990) on the motivation process and constructi...

It is ten years since Ib Holm Sørensen, that rare breed of both a formal methods researcher and practitioner, passed away at the early age of 62, in the centenary year of the birth of the computer science pioneer Alan Turing. This article considers Ib Sørensen’s life and work, especially regarding his contribution to the field of formal methods. In...

It is thirty years since the formation of the Z User Group (ZUG), established to support the Z notation throughout the world. The Z User Group was established in 1992 to promote the use and development of the Z notation, a formal specification language for the description of and reasoning about computer-based systems. It was formally constituted on...

The rapid global rise of immersive digital experience at exhibitions and museums sheds light on the intense need for deep engagement with art and the emotions that it projects and the stories it tells. With social isolation imposed by COVID, during more than two years and counting, human digital identity is evolving as digital experience moves to t...

Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as digital and social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. From...

The SEFM 2021 19th International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (https://sefm-conference.github.io) was held entirely online due to the Covid pandemic during 6–10 December 2021, with free registration. The conference was jointly organised by Carnegie Mellon University (USA), Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan), and the Univers...

A previous article in FACS FACTS (Bowen, 2021) has discussed Russian logician Moses Schönfinke l (1888–1942) and his pioneering work on combinatory logic, prompted by an online talk by Stephen Wolfram (2020a), exactly a century to the hour after a talk by Schönfinkel in Germany, where he was a member of David Hilbert‘s group. Wolfram wrote further...

The Italian Renaissance started a rebirth of culture and knowledge not experienced since Roman times. Leonardo da Vinci was arguably the leading polymath of the era. We are now in the throes of a Digital Renaissance, arguably started by Alan Turing in England. The infor-mation revolution that we are now experien-cing is as disruptive as any change...

Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. We investigate th...

FACS has moved online for its meetings using the Zoom facilities of the BCS. This makes recording of talks easier, as well as enabling a more geographically dispersed audience. Of course, the networking opportunities are reduced, and we aim to resume meetings at the BCS London office when this is possible. It is then likely that talks will be hybri...

The ABZ 2021 8th International Conference on Rigorous State Based Methods was held entirely virtually during June 2021. This incorporated presentations of papers from the planned ABZ 2020 conference, postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was held during 9–11 June 2021, preceded by a Colloquium on the Occasion of Egon Börger's 75th Birthday wit...

Did Alan Turing OBE FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), the celebrated mathematician, codebreaker, and pioneer computer scientist, ever visit Oxford? He is well-known for his connections with the University of Cambridge, Bletchley Park, the National Physical Laboratory, and the University of Manchester, but there is no known written archival record o...

When Covid-19 rushed into our lives, it sent shockwaves across the globe – suddenly we faced “lockdown” – we said goodbye to the way it was but did not understand what this brave new world of isolation and separation would mean and how it would the impact life as we knew it – our identity, relationships and freedoms we enjoyed, and wondered what da...

In this paper, we discuss the community associated with Abstract State Machines (ASM), especially in the context of a Community of Practice (CoP), a social science concept, considering the development of ASM by its community of researchers and practitioners over time. We also consider the long-term historical context of the advisor tree of Egon Bör...

This Oral History of Museum Computing is provided by Jonathan Bowen, and was recorded on the 1st of March, 2021, by Paul Marty and Kathy Jones. It is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY), which allows for unrestricted reuse provided that appropriate credit is given to the original source. For the recording o...

This Oral History of Museum Computing is provided by Jonathan Bowen, and was recorded on the 1st of March, 2021, by Paul Marty and Kathy Jones. It is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY), which allows for unrestricted reuse provided that appropriate credit is given to the original source. For the recording o...

BCS-FACS is one of the more academic BCS specialist groups, with an associated journal and newsletter. We mainly organise evening seminars, usually at the BCS London office. Annual events include a joint London Mathematical Society LMS/FACS seminar at the LMS headquarters and the Peter Landin Semantics Seminar, presented online by Tim Denvir and Tr...

I attended an online talk by Stephen Wolfram (2020) celebrating the Russian logician Moses Schönfinkel (1888–1942). It was delivered exactly a century after a talk by Schönfinkel at the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he was a member of the group there headed by David Hilbert (1862–1943). Schönfinkel’s talk in 1920 was entitled Elemente d...

Kenneth Arthur (Ken) Robinson joined the staff at the University of New South Wales in the mid-1960s. Always a high achiever, Ken had been dux of primary school, dux of secondary school and had topped his joint Bachelor of Science/Bachelor of Engineering degree course at the University of Sydney.

When I heard about Tim Denvir’s suggestion of an ALGOL 60 @ 60 talk for FACS’s 2020 Peter Landin Semantics Seminar (see the report by John Tucker in this issue of the FACS FACTS newsletter), I was alerted to look out for any reference to ALGOL 60 in anything that I read. I happened to have a copy of the excellent 2013 memoir An Appetite for Wonder...

Slides for a talk on museums and the World Wide Web Virtual Library at the EVA London 2020 Conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts. This talk provides a first-hand presentation of the early history of museums online, especially in the context of the WWW Virtual Library. The talk is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

It is over fifty years since the subject discipline of software engineering and more than forty years from when the area of formal methods have been established. During this period, the academic community has accomplished extensive research in foundations and methods of software engineering, as well as developing and teaching a large body of softwa...

The Italian Renaissance started a rebirth of culture and knowledge not experienced since Roman times. Leonardo da Vinci was arguably the leading polymath of the era. We are now in the throes of a Digital Renaissance, arguably started by Alan Turing in England. This paper draws some parallels between these two periods and speculates on the future of...

Did Alan Turing OBE FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), the celebrated mathematician, codebreaker, and pioneer computer scientist, ever visit Oxford? He is well-known for his connections with the University of Cambridge, Bletchley Park, the National Physical Laboratory, and the University of Manchester, but there is no known written archival record o...

This half-day Symposium explores themes of computational culture and artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of digital art especially, as well as digital culture and heritage in general. The increasing ubiquity of AI and machine learning raises questions for technology and art in the future, and for the transformations that have already occurr...

The hardware description language Verilog has been standardized and widely used in industry. Multithreaded Discrete Event Simulation Language (MDESL) is a Verilog-like language and it contains a rich variety of interesting features such as the event-driven computation and shared-variable concurrency as well as the realtime feature. In this paper, w...

It is a sad fact of aging that one’s colleagues start to pass away with the passing years. But for some, this is before their time and this “In Memoriam” article is a tribute to five such colleagues of mine who passed away during 2015 to 2020. It is both a brief record of their achievements, largely based on their Wikipedia pages, and a personal re...

It is a sad fact of aging that one’s colleagues start to pass away with the passing years. But for some, this is before their time and this “In Memoriam” article is a tribute to five such colleagues of mine who passed away during 2015 to 2020. It is both a brief record of their achievements, largely based on their Wikipedia pages, and a personal re...

A zipped copy of all the microprocessor and other cards in ASCII text format.

In this paper, we analyse trends of the first wave of museum websites (from the 1990s to the early 2000s) to understand how the characteristics of the Internet (specifically the World Wide Web), of museum staff, and museum audiences shaped the adoption of technology and new forms of participation and what they can tell us about engagement for museu...

I first encountered EVA London in 1995 through my establishment of the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), part of the World Wide Web Virtual Library. In 2003, I was invited back as a keynote speaker on the subject of website accessibility for cultural heritage resources. Since then I have been involved with every EVA London conference either as...

In recent years, public engagement in museums is increasingly being influenced by the paradigm of "citizen science", that is, active participation in research teams by members of the general public with no formal training in the field of research concerned. This paper provides an overview of citizen science approaches which museums can deploy using...

In this paper, we analyse trends of the first wave of museum websites (from the 1990s to the early 2000s) to understand how the characteristics of the Internet (specifically the World Wide Web), of museum staff, and museum audiences shaped the adoption of technology and new forms of participation and what they can tell us about engagement for museu...

Computing the future, as life and research moves to the Internet, we are engaged increasingly in digital encounters from present to past and into the future with real people, events and documents. This paper focuses on the newly born-digital relationship between Alan Turing, father of computer science, and Leonardo da Vinci, master of Renaissance a...

The Italian Renaissance started a rebirth of culture and knowledge not experienced since Roman times. Leonardo da Vinci was arguably the leading polymath of the era. We are now in the throes of a Digital Renaissance, arguably started by Alan Turing in England. This paper draws some parallels between these two periods and speculates on the future of...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International School on Engineering Trustworthy Software Systems, SETSS 2019, held in Chongqing, China, in April 2019. The five chapters in this volume provide lectures on leading-edge research in methods and tools for use in computer system engineering. The topics covered in these chapters...

Information on FACS events can be found on the BCS-FACS website, which can be found under www.bcs-facs.org. We welcome ideas for further FACS events. Please contact the FACS Chair, Jonathan Bowen, on jonathan.bowen@lsbu.ac.uk

Since the last FACS FACTS newsletter issued in August 2018, we have held a number of seminars and other events. This article provides an overview and record of these, both past and forthcoming. All FACS events are held at the BCS London Office unless otherwise stated. Note that since August 2019, the BCS London Office has moved to 25 Copthall Aven...

Hardware aliasing occurs when the same logical address can access different physical memory locations. This is a problem for software on some embedded systems and more generally when hardware becomes faulty in irretrievable locations, such as on a Mars Lander. We show how to work around the hardware problem with software logic, compiling code so it...

This paper extends a companion paper on compilation for target platforms with hidden deterministic hardware aliasing to generate aliasing as well as compensate for it, in so-called 'chaotic' compilation. That may be applied in encrypted computing to statistically hide any information inadvertently introduced by a human programmer. A prototype compi...

A personal archive of material related to formal methods has been deposited at Swansea University by the author in 2018. This paper documents the contents of the archive and includes associated publications. The archival material forms part of a larger History of Computing Collection founded by Prof. John Tucker at Swansea in 2007 and held at the U...

Verilog is a hardware description language (HDL) that has been standardized and widely used in industry. Multithreaded discrete event simulation language (MDESL) is a Verilog-like language. It contains interesting features such as event-driven computation and shared-variable concurrency. This article considers how the algebraic semantics links with...

Once quiet places protected by walls, museums are increasingly besieged by activist groups. Spurred by social and political causes, they storm the gates bypassing the gatekeepers, to deliver their message and insist that museums become relevant, participatory and interactive, and give voice to their communities and audience. With no place to hide i...

This half-day Symposium explores themes of digital art, culture, and heritage, bringing together speakers from a range of disciplines to consider technology with respect to artistic and academic practice. As we increasingly see ourselves and life through a digital lens and the world communicated on digital screens, we experience altered states of b...

We discuss possible directions that museums could take with respect to the rapidly developing digital culture in which they find themselves. Successful museums must be very adaptable to the changing nature of public expectations. Some of the important aspects to be considered have been covered in earlier chapters in this book. Here we take this kno...

A defining moment in the development of digital culture, when communication went digital, can be traced to the paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Shannon (Bell Syst Tech J 27:379–423, 1948), the inventor of the “bit” and a new digital model of communication that he referred to as Information Theory which postulates that “all data coul...

This book explores how digital culture is transforming museums in the 21st century. Offering a corpus of new evidence for readers to explore, the authors trace the digital evolution of the museum and that of their audiences, now fully immersed in digital life, from the Internet to home and work. In a world where life in code and digits has redefine...

This paper first describes an `obfuscating' compiler technology developed for encrypted computing, then examines if the trivial case without encryption produces much-sought indistinguishability obfuscation.

The architecture of an encrypted high-performance microprocessor designed on the principle that a nonstandard arithmetic generates encrypted processor states is described here. Data in registers, in memory and on buses exists in encrypted form. Any block encryption is feasible, in principle. The processor is (initially) intended for cloud-based rem...

A smart city is an urban area that broadly refers to a collective model in which technological advancements are used to enhance systemic capabilities aiming to enhance competitiveness, effectiveness, quality of life and sustainability. A major focus of the chapter is a review of smart city platforms and participatory-centric approaches and their po...

This volume contains lectures on leading-edge research in methods and tools for use in computer system engineering; at the 4th International School on Engineering Trustworthy Software Systems, SETSS 2018, held in April 2018 at Southwest University in Chongqing, China. The five chapters in this volume provide an overview of research in the frontier...

This paper first describes an `obfuscating' compiler technology developed for encrypted computing, then examines if the trivial case without encryption produces much-sought indistinguishability obfuscation.

Encrypted computing is an emerging approach to security and privacy of user data on a computing system with respect to the operating system and other powerful insiders as adversaries. It is based on a processor that ‘works encrypted’, taking encrypted inputs to encrypted outputs while data remains in encrypted form throughout processing. An appropr...

Formal methods and agile software development as part of the software engineering process have sometimes been seen as opposing techniques that are difficult to reconcile. However, in the opinion of the authors, these two approaches are orthogonal and complementary in nature, at least when used judiciously in a real‐world setting. Both methodologies...

The architecture of an encrypted high-performance microprocessor designed on the principle that a nonstandard arithmetic generates encrypted processor states is described