Jonathan Peter Bowen

Verified

Jonathan verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Jonathan verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• Engineering Science
• Emeritus Professor of Computing at London South Bank University

This survey article stems from the preparatory lecture on mathematical logic delivered at SETSS 2024 and a series of lectures over recent years on mathematical logic, human-cyber-physical systems, and artificial intelligence to diverse audiences. The thematic points we seek to reiterate include the following: mathematical logic is the natural found...

The field of formal methods is now sufficiently well-established that many key researchers are reaching the end of their “formal” career or beyond. Celebrations are typically held when leaders in the field reach their retirement or a significant birthday, normally by decade. For example, in 2023, Jifeng He, formerly a collaborator with Tony Hoare a...

The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is taking hold like an expanding universe and setting into motion the spawning of a new global culture. In parallel with these changes. humans interact with media messages steeped in visual and conversational language streamed across neural global platforms, with billions of humans participating. How is this...

Verilog is a hardware description language (HDL) that has become an industry-standard HDL of IEEE. Multithreaded discrete event simulation language (MDESL) is a Verilog-like language. Previously, we have studied the operational semantics and denotational semantics for MDESL. This paper investigates the soundness and completeness of the operational...

Modelling and verification of multi-threaded programs are difficult since one must consider all the ways that instructions in different threads can be interleaved. Modern hardware architectures and mainstream programming languages employ relaxed memory models for efficiency purposes, and the additional interleavings from them make the modelling and...

George Mallen and members of the early Computer Arts Society

Professor Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, FRS1, reached his 90th birthday in January this year. Tony Hoare, as he is better known, was knighted for his services to theoretical computer science, and was one of the earliest computer scientists to be made a Fellow by the Royal Society. I believe the first computer scientist to be elected FRS was Mau...

The School on Engineering Trustworthy Software Systems (SETSS) series was established ten years ago by my colleague Prof. Zhiming Liu in the summer of 2014 at Southwest University (SWU) in Chongqing, China. SETSS provides extended lecture courses on computing topics by lecturers from around the world. Since 2014, there have been further Schools hel...

Here I record some recollections of Professor Sir Tony Hoare. As has been said elsewhere “Recollections may vary”, but these are my memories as I remember them. Apologies now for any infelicities.

The mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954) has been considered by some to be the father of computer science and was also interested in ear-ly ideas relating to formal methods and program proving. In 2012, I co-organized an event in Oxford to celebrate the centenary of Turing’s birth. This was in parallel with celebratory events in Bletchley Park, Ca...

A Paradigm Shift and Defining Moment in the 21st Century: Fuelled by the convergence of computational culture, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, arts, and culture are experiencing a revolutionary moment poised to change human life and society on a global scale. There is the promise of the Metaverse, with extended reality (XR) and immer...

Leonardo da Vinci’s art, his notebooks and drawings form a voluminous corpus of work that continues to define humanism from the Renaissance to the present. We are awed by the depth and scope of his work, a symbol of his search for truth, and understanding of the human mind, body, and soul that informs and guides us through our journey through time...

Propelled by changes wrought by the pandemic when humans were experiencing life mostly from home, was a time when the public square seemed empty, and when museums, theaters, and university campuses were closed. The world seemed to stop, as we experienced radical social and cultural changes, we shifted to virtual life mostly at home, facilitated by...

The Computer Arts Archive is a not-for-profit company based in Leicester that collects, exhibits, and promotes computer arts for the benefit of artists, audiences, curators, educators, and researchers. The archive looks to collaborate with other collections, museums, and galleries to explore the impact of digital culture and ensure that computer ar...

This chapter begins with 20th-century modernism at a time when art embraces new aesthetics embodied in breaking the rules of the academy, individualism, seeing the world through altered states of being and the subconscious mind, and artists forge new paths to making art in the digital twenty-first century. It considers developments in the arts that...

The film, The Imitation Game, a Hollywood version of Turing’s life, brought fame to a life that was anything but a game. Turing brought his unmatched genius for mathematics and computing and total dedication to his work which led him to break the wartime German Enigma code and introduce artificial intelligence as we understand it today and is chang...

This chapter explores how computational culture is transforming arts research in the context of human digital behavior and experience combined with the rapid evolution of global communication and interaction in physical and virtual environments. What we now can consider primary source information for arts and historical research is growing in scope...

The internationalExpo (2020)exhibition, delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from 2021 to 2022. It is itself a “Metaverse” of the world with pavilions of 192 countries presenting their national characteristics in any way that they wish, within varying financial restrictions. For example, the UK pavilion inc...

This chapter focuses on possible future trends in the arts and computational culture based in part on the contents of the rest of the book’s chapters and developments in the arts in the age of AI converging with sociocultural paradigm shifts, as VR, AR, generative art, ChatGPT, robotics, and avatars invade the creative industries. We examine how AI...

The fragility of the arts in a time of cultural conflict and war is seen prophetically in the rise of political strife across the globe, while at the same time, arts institutions in response to protests are rethinking collection interpretation and exhibition narratives that reflect the sociocultural environment and interact inside and outside the m...

A significant transformation is providing a defining moment in the 21st century, propelled by the convergence of computational culture, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). This coming together is sparking a revolutionary phase for arts and culture, with the potential to influence human existence and global society profoundly. T...

Review of: The Second Law — Resolving the Mystery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics by Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Media, Inc., 2023, 584pp ISBN 978-1579550837

In September 2023, I co-organized and attended the “Jifeng@80” Festschrift Symposium to celebrate the 80th birthday of Prof. Jifeng He at the Shanghai Science Hall, as announced in the last FACS FACTS newsletter. Jifeng He has been an important contributor to the field of formal methods, especially in collaboration with Tony Hoare. We provided a br...

This paper discusses three case studies of early science museum-related websites in the 1990s and early 2000s, when web technology was still relatively new and evolving. The Virtual Museum of Computing (VMoC) was a completely virtual museum, originally produced in 1995 as part of the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), an international online mus...

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...

The conservation of digital art and displays is increasingly important for long-term access and exhibition of such artifacts, with respect to both museums (Boiano et al. 2022; Falcão & Ensom 2019) and archives. Sometimes this can be achieved by rebuilding artworks (Clark & Carroll 2022). The need for organisations and funding to aid in the conserva...

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...

In the paper, we explore the notion of digital citizenship, particularly with respect to museums and cultural organisations. Digitally literate citizens are more often able to engage on the Internet as part of one or more online communities. We start by considering some examples of pioneering digital citizenship before the term became widely used....

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...