Research in trails - Luc Moreau Inaugural Lecture

The complicated network of trails – which can be traced backwards and forwards in time and space – are the subject of Professor Luc Moreau’s inaugural lecture next Wednesday (19 October).

Professor Moreau, of the Web and Internet Science research group in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, is a leading expert in Provenance, an important area of computer science which makes a crucial contribution to issues of trust in computer-generated data by helping users understand the origins of data. Provenance is important in many fields – for example in forensic analysis of computer trails of information (surrounding issues of financial affairs and fraud), in health and medicine (the health and history of organs for transplantation), in science (the reliability of scientific data and the reproducibility of experimental results and observations), and in art, which has long been familiar with the idea of provenance, but which is now just as reliant on computer information for the history of objects, their previous ownership and validation.

Professor Moreau is co-chair of the Provenance Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He initiated the successful Provenance Challenge series, which saw the involvement of over 20 institutions investigating provenance inter-operability in three successive challenges, and which resulted in the specification of the community Open Provenance Model (OPM).

Previously, he led the development of provenance technology in the FP6 Provenance project and the Provenance Aware Service Oriented Architecture (PASOA) project. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. He is currently co-investigator of the Orchid, PATINA (Personal Architectonics Through Interactions with Artifacts), and e-stats projects.

“Understanding where data comes from will enable users to decide if it is trustworthy,” says Professor Moreau. “This will also lead to a new generation of services over the Web, capable of producing trusted information.”

Professor Luc Moreau will deliver his inaugural lecture on Wednesday 19 October on the subject: ‘Research in trails – a trail of my research’. The lecture takes place in Nightingale Building (67) on the University’s Highfield Campus at 5 pm, with refreshments available from 4.30 pm. The lecture is open to the public (no tickets required) and all are welcome.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.

Read the Lecture Abstract