Photo: Tricia Malley and Ros Gillespie
Michael Fourman
Professor Michael P. Fourman
Informatics
The University of Edinburgh
2 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh EH8 9LW
Scotland, UK
This is a legacy page. Contect is (slowly) being moved to my new page, which has some up-to-date information not included here.
PGP Public Key
ID 0xF33640E5
Fingerprint 39D3 2263 CA72 22E2 AEA77E02 49E4 CFB8 F336 40E5
(+44) 131 650 4416 phone
(+44) 131 650 6626 fax
(+44) 771 002 6848 mobile
Michael.Fourman@ed.ac.uk
I am a member of the Division of Informatics in The University of Edinburgh's Faculty of Science and Engineering. I am a member of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems, and the Institute for Representation and Reasoning, and Professor of Computer Systems.
This page contains links to details of my research interests and publications; a summary of personal information, my education, and career, and, also material on my recreational interests in cooking and sailing.
Please send any comments to me.
Photo: Tricia Malley and Ros Gillespie
I started my academic career as a mathematical logician, viewed by mathematicians as a kind of philosopher, and by philosophers, somewhat more accurately, as a mathematician. Now I'm counted a computer scientist, and hope to contribute to the development of the new science of Informatics. Between these times, I've worked in Electronic Engineering. Yet, all the while, my interests have hardly changed. How is this?
Whatever diverse aspects of the world we represent within a computer, we reduce to formal symbols. In computer science, we characterise computation as the methodical, or algorithmic, processing of formal representations. Logicians study reasoning, represented as the methodical processing of formal statements. More generally, they study the relationships between formal representations and their meanings.
The processing of formal representations encompasses both logic and computation, but without meaning, both are dry. Meaning relates our formal representations to the world, and brings them to life.
To grasp the world, we model it. To interact, we communicate. Increasingly, we use formal, digital representations, largely because computer technology makes them tractable. A global network of computers supports the representation, transformation and communication of information. We see similar phenomena in human communication. We have mental models, we reason, we communicate. Can these phenomena be understood in terms of traditional accounts of logic and computation? Perhaps not. But these traditions provide a good basis from which to start, complemented by the traditions of cognitive science, psychology and linguistics.
We define Informatics to be the study of the structure, behaviour, and interactions of natural and artificial computational systems: a science of information. We seek to relate cognition, communication, and computation; to understand what information is, how it is represented, and how it is transformed--whether by computation or communication, whether by organisms or artefacts.
The science of information is emerging as a new division of science, alongside the physical and biological sciences. It is contributing to a revolution in the ways we think about the world, and ourselves - about perception, about decision, about action.
Longley, Fleuriot and I have EPSRC funding for a new project, A Proof System for Correct Program Development, to start in 2001. This will exploit advances in semantic understanding, coming from Longley's work on notions of computability. We will integrate programming and proof by implementing a logic whose terms are defined using the programming language (a subset of ML).
This style of integration was first introduced in the LAMBDA system. Longley's work will allow us to cater for a larger subset of ML (including some non-functional features).
I've placed a section on cooking here because it is one of my lasting pleasures, and because, long ago in Montreal, I promised Jacques Parent a recipe for Soupe au Moules. Watch this space...
For the time being, try
Gradually add the flavoured sugar syrup to the tahini mixture, beating all the while. Add the nuts -- as many as you like, this mixture will easily take 400g of nuts if you like your halva that way. Shop-bought halva has far less.
Pour the mixture into an oiled cake tin (either with a press-out base, or lined with baking paper) or plastic container, and leave in the fridge for 36 hours. Cut while cold, with a sharp knife (if the halva is softer than the nuts it's difficult to make a clean cut).
Original recipie from Peter Conistis, Eleni's, Sydney
Scrape off excess dill, pat dry, slice across the grain, fairly thick (3mm). Serve with Gravlaxsäs.
Combine
Beat in gradually (to obtain a thick consistency)
Add
With my family, I sailed on the 25-ton, ocean-going junk K'ung Fu-Tse, designed and built (of aluminium alloy) by Tom Colvin in Miles, Virginia, USA.
We collected KFT from Fort Myers, Florida in 1990 and sailed her back to Edinburgh with the following ports of call:
Our later voyages were less extensive, and in 1998 we regretfully sold KFT.
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 99.2beta6 (1.42)
Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996,
Nikos Drakos,
Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999,
Ross Moore,
Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 1 welcome.tex
The translation was initiated by Michael Fourman on 2002-06-24