Peter Ladkin's Potted Biography

Peter B. Ladkin is Professor of Computer Networks and Distributed Systems at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. His research specializes in methods for ensuring the reliability, and for analysing the failure, of complex heterogeneous systems, and distributed systems in general. He has specialised mainly in systems used in public transportation, primarily air and rail. Apart from that, he has worked on constraint satisfaction problems and temporal reasoning, and performed combinatorial analysis of message-passing in concurrent systems. He contributes regularly to the ACM's on-line Forum on Risks to the Public in Computing and Related Systems (the Risks Forum). He is especially keen to apply formal and informal logic in systems engineering, where he feels logical techniques could do a lot of good, and is interested in social and ethical issues and consequences of ubiquitous computing.

During the 1980's, he worked at SRI International's Computer Science Lab (1984-5) and the Kestrel Institute (1985-9), as well as consulting (1989-91) and teaching at various universities, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining the Bielefeld faculty in 1995, he was Konrad Zuse Visiting Professor at the University of Hamburg (1991), a visiting researcher at IBM's Almaden Research Center (1992) as well as at the Universities of Berne and Stirling (1992-4), and a visiting professor at the Université de Nancy and at INRIA Lorraine (1994). He was Visiting Professor at the INRS Télécommunications Lab of the Université de Québec in Montréal (1995-9), and at Middlesex University in London (1996-2002). His collaborators and coauthors in informatics have included Henry Kautz of the University of Washington, Leslie Lamport of Microsoft Corporation, Stefan Leue of the University of Constance, Roger Maddux of Iowa State University, Alexander Reinefeld of the Humboldt University Berlin, Barbara Simons, formerly of IBM Almaden Research Center and Santa Teresa Labs, and Harold Thimbleby of the University of Swansea.

Peter Ladkin and his group's current collaborations are primarily with system engineers at the Institute of Railway Systems Engineering and Traffic Safety (IfEV) at the Technical University of Brunswick (Braunschweig); Siemens Transportation Systems Rail Automation Division, Research and Development Integrity, in Brunswick; the Chair of Railway Signalling and Traffic Safety Systems at the Technical University of Dresden; and the company Causalis Limited which he founded.

He holds an Erdös number of 3, a Ph.D. in Logic from the University of California at Berkeley (1987), an M.A. in Math also from Berkeley (1981) and a B.A.(Hons) in Maths and Philosophy from the University of Oxford (1973). He is a British citizen and was a US Permanent Resident Alien (yes, it says that on the permit) before returning to Europe after 18 golden years in California. He holds a US Private Pilot certificate with Instrument Rating, with 750+ hours total time, and owned a Piper Archer II for nearly a decade. He speaks and writes English, German and French after a fashion, and is not averse to misunderstanding Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch when opportunity presents. He likes good wine, healthy food, physical activity outdoors, wildflowers, birds, small furry wild animals, fiddle and tin whistle music as well as singing and other serious music, reading poetry, and enjoys teasing small children, especially his own son when he can still manage to get a word in first. (Well, that was then; this is now: he owns six bicycles - a Nöll recumbent, a Stevens lightweight, a R&M Delite city bike, a tandem for father and son, a R&M Frog for business travel, and an old Montague - and nordic-skis out his front door on the one day a year he can.)

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