David Hutchison is Professor of Computing at Lancaster University and has worked in the areas of computer communications and distributed systems for the past 15 years. He has completed many UK and European funded research contracts and published over 120 papers as well as writing and editing books in these areas.
From 1988 until 1993 he was seconded part time as a technical consultant in Communications and Distributed Systems at the DTI as part of the SERC/DTI Joint Framework for Information Technology (JFIT). Part of his role was the development of new UK R&D programmes including Open Distributed Systems Architecture (ODSA), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), High Performance Interfaces and Protocols (HPIP), and Multimedia and Networking Applications (MNA). Another part of his role was to keep a watching brief on the European Commission's IT and Telecommunications R&D programmes. During this time he was also a member of the IEE Professional Group C3 on Information Systems and Networks, latterly becoming chairman. More recently, he has become a member of Professional Group E14 on Television, Radio, and Data Broadcasting.
He was a member of the EPSRC Communications and Distributed Systems (CDS) Committee and more recently has served on the Communications Panel that assesses grant applications from the UK academic community. He assists the EPSRC on several aspects of their research programme planning and is a technical expert adviser to the Office of Telecommunications (OFTEL). He is a technical expert and auditor for the European Commission in the areas of Telecommunications and Telematics, and represents the UK on the management committee of the COST264 project on multimedia group communication, and the COST263 project on Quality of Internet Services.
The main theme of his current research is architecture, services and protocols for distributed multimedia systems, including QoS for the Internet, and multimedia content description and extraction. He is involved in several UK and European collaborative projects, in which an integrating theme is Quality of Service for multimedia communications. He is a programme committee member for many international conferences and workshops, and is Program Chair for the IEEE OpenArch2000 Conference.
He recently finished a year's sabbatical leave as a visiting academic at HP Labs in Bristol, UK, at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and at BT Labs in Ipswich, UK.