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For nearly two decades, I followed a career as an academic physical metallurgist, and I have returned to this field after nearly a decade working in commercial software development. Since September 2001, I have been creating a new superconductors company Diboride Conductors Ltd. in Cambridge. Since 2003, I have also been working on creating a community in Cambridge of people working in energy-related research. This was formally launched as the Cambridge Energy Forum in 2005.
I am still helping to run Klebos Ltd, an Internet services company in Cambridge, specialising in email and intranet/extranet technologies.
On June 1st 2000, I joined the Cambridge offices of Metaweb Ltd., a struggling Internet company, as CEO; resigning from Laser-Scan a couple of weeks before they were bought by Yeoman Ltd. In retrospect, this was just past the peak of the dot.com boom, and the worst possible time to make such a move: Metaweb failed, and Klebos was created to continue to support customers.
I came back to the UK in December 1999 after living in Italy for a year, seconded by Laser Scan Ltd. to help the European Commission Joint Research Centre at Ispra. I was working on feature identity and relationships with the Open GIS Consortium. I also worked on internet architectures for geographic information. I joined Laser-Scan at the Cambridge Science Park (UK) on July 1st, 1997.
Before coming to Laser-Scan, I had been running the software development team in Quillion Systems Ltd (St.John's Innovation Centre, Cowley Road, Cambridge) since 1993 - when Quillion was only 6 people. My last project there was establishing their credibility with the North Sea oil industry which was very successful.
Between 1989 and 1993 I was a UK Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) Advanced Research Fellow researching engineering design information and use at Carnegie-Mellon and Cambridge Universities. Before that I worked at another small Cambridge start-up company Analysys Ltd. 1987-1988 where I wrote telecoms strategy modelling software (the first 3 iterations of the STEM decision support tool). Before that, I had a series of post-doc. research posts, mostly at the Engineering Dept. here apart from a Royal Society research fellowship at the Technion, Haifa. I did my PhD in materials science (surface mechanical plasticity in ceramics) in 1979.
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All papers Copyright © 1988-2003 Philip Sargent unless otherwise noted. Items marked **NEW** are recently posted here, not necessarily recently written.
These are the highlights, I also have a full list of all my publications.
Agent-Based
Computation
An article I wrote for The Guardian in 1992. In it I
mentioned the development method used by Linux and Netscape
several years later: "What is needed
is a way for many individuals to collaborate by writing software
components [...] The overhead of organising a collaboration rises
as the square of the number of participants. So above a certain
number of people involved, the non-communicating collaboration is
more efficient. [...] Populations of people and companies
which prefer to collaborate indirectly, only through the medium
of the software they are developing,.. "
Software
project plan
An example, taken from Steve McConnell's
book, of a website used for software management for a GIS
research application.
Thinking
up new ideas **NEW**
A change in the course of human history through creativity ?
Aligned-linear
nuclear
fusion
A safe, cool technology ?
The
Kingdom of England and
Wales
What shall we call ourselves when Scotland goes ? And what flag
shall we use ?
Implants to deliver
programmable medicines
Proteins, RNA fragments, polysaccharides ?
Song of the Ancient Physicists (Scientia) **NEW**
Proteins, RNA fragments, polysaccharides ?
JavaGIS
A short note on what will probably happen and where it would fit
in the market.
Object
Oriented GIS
David Arctur's tutorial presentation on object oriented GIS
which I edited and revised.
Object-Oriented
GIS meets Client-Server
Computing
A presentation on the architectural decisions which sit beneath
GISs designed for collaborative group working. It begins with a
review of current relational-database approaches to client-server
GIS and then go on to contrast that with other architectures.
Where highly-specific detail is required to illustrate a point,
it uses the example of Laser-Scan's "Gothic" architecture.
SQL
Middleware for GIS
Recently posted, but out-of-date market position review of
Spatial Cartridge, SDE etc.
OGC
Feature Identity & Relationships Working Group
I am the chairman and I have contributed many documents to this
website.
Spatio-Temporal
GIS
A seminar given at JRC Ispra on 25th May 1998 summarising
developments in spatio-temporal geographic informaiton systems.
This is an on-line version but with full speakers notes. (Email
me if you want a copy of the original PowerPoint97 file.)
Feature Identities,
Descriptors and Handles
September 1998. Submitted to Interop'99 The 2nd
International
Conference on Interoperating Geographic Information Systems,
Zurich, March 10-12, 1999. Also a zipped
Postscript (68k)
copy. (This is not the later version which was published in the
conference proceedings.)
FeatureRelationships:
Implications (36k)
January 1998 Discussion paper to the Open GIS Consortium
technical committees.
Designing an Evolving Federated
Geographic Data Repository (zipped PostScript 62kB)
How some organisations cannot manage such an project. Also
(152K PDF)
Software
project plan
An example, taken from Steve McConnell's
book, of a website used for software management for a GIS
research application.
The
Future of the PDM Market
More than a year old, but posted here recently. A review of the
established markets that PDM works with and some forecasts about
which companies will end up on top.
PDM
and MRP Interoperability
More than a year old, but posted here recently. Why "an
interface" between a PDM system and an MRP system is not
something you can just buy.
Creative design: a
computational view of the generation of new design spaces
(105kB)
This paper examines creative design from the point of view that
an essence of design is the accommodation of incommensurate
world-views. Each world-view can be thought of as a set of
design spaces and one type of creative action corresponds
to creating new design spaces.
Science or Non-science ? A
Non-Scientific Theory of Design (43kB)
This paper looks at different types of "designerly-thinking" and
characterises design as an activity that intrinsically requires
the rationalisation of incommeasurate viewpoints.
Satisfactory Design Theory
(11kB)
A note which discusses Simon's satisficing and bounded
rationality ideas with respect to proposed theories of
design.
Cults
of Design Science
(7kB)
A brief note which discusses different community's views
of "design science"..
Shared Memory in Design: A
Unifying Theme for Research and Practice (130+17kB)
A new unifying theme for design theory. Using the concept
of shared memory, we both account for past observations of design
in practice and recommend actions to improve design in the
future. We examine several practical implications for design
teams.
Inherently Flexible Cell
Communications (129kB)
Report CUED/E-MANUF./TR.2 June 1993. Also published as
Inherently Flexible Cell Communications: a review, Computer
Integrated Manufacturing Systems, 6 (4) 244-259, Nov.
1993
During the 1980s, in a series of post-doc research jobs with Mike Ashby, I updated and rewrote the deformation mechanism map software originally written by Mike and reworked by Harold Frost in Fortran. The latest copy of the code (in Pascal) is now downloadable in PC-executable form from these pages. Mike and Harold's book is now out of print, but the technique is firmly embedded in undergraduate courses world-wide in materials science and geology.
A Tabular Materials Data
Interchange Format (130kB)
The Cambridge Tabular Data Interchange Format: original full
report and appendices. Also published in CODATA Bulletin 24 (1)
(1992) 47-53 (Hemisphere Press).
(Presented at 12th Int. CODATA Conf., Columbus 15 July 1990) and
J. Chemical Information and Computer Sciences 31 (1991) 297-300
American Chemical Soc., publishers.
Materials
Information for
CAD/CAM
Butterworth-Heinemann Publ., August 1991, 172 pages, ISBN
0-7506-0277-5.
"This book is intended for anyone who is
planning the construction, use or management of any kind of
engineering materials property information system. The book
addresses the problem of designing databases, decision support
aids, expert systems and communication systems that can be
integrated with manual and software-supported tasks in design and
manufacture, in CADand
CAM. The tasks covered are
those of materials selection,
materials modelling and materials process simulation: anything
that involves access to materials identification or property
information."
Now out of print, the full content is published here with a new preface. The entire book can be downloaded as a zipfile (228kB). *Corrected* references (September 1999).
Estimating the
Mechanical Properties of Propane Hydrate (3rd February
1989)
I did this for engineers investigating the Piper Alpha oil rig
disaster. The accident was thought to be caused by a build-up of
solid hydrocarbon hydrate in a pump, and as far as I know, I
produced the only estimate of the strength of this material. It
is a variety of ice that is stable up to 17oC (but not
at atmospheric pressure).
The COLLYEAR Report - Some personal comments (5th May
1985)
The Collyear report recommended that the UK spend £120m to
encourage NIMPs: New and Improved Materials and Processes. In many
areas, I felt that it missed the point. *New*
posting.
Conference paper (Japan)
(53kB)
This is a summary of some of the main results of the study (see
below) with no data, diagrams discussion or case-studies. It does
not cover the contributions we made as to how modelling
activities - including human activities - for materials
processing can be classified by using the boundary conditions of
the PDFs being modelled.
Materials
Process Modelling: A state of the art review and proposals for
change: New needs in training, data and software technology
(385kB)
This is the full report of a study performed in 1992-3 (with
ACME funding) by myself, Hugh Shercliff and Bob Wood. Now in
XHTML standard format.
What does Jonathan
Miller know about SF?
My first publication, in The Radio Times in 1971.
You can send e-mail to me at which where I am collecting my email from these days. [This email address on this webpage is obfuscated to prevent simple-minded spambots getting it.]
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