We have led numerous large and influential projects including initiating and directing the six-year five-university EPSRC Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Dependability. This was characterised by the EPSRC reviewers as "redefining the international scientific landscape for dependable systems research.";
Newcastle's innovative work on distributed systems, following on from major success with the Arjuna system, has led to research in service-oriented middleware that has been exploited by a spin-off company, Arjuna Technologies Ltd. This company developed transaction service software based on our research, which is now an integral part of Redhat Inc.'s JBoss application server middleware. In its study on the impact of software engineering research upon software engineering practice, the Impact Project of the ACM Special Interest Group in Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) noted that:The Smith Institute for Industrial Mathematics and System Engineering has cited our research on load management in distributed systems as an example of 'best research practice' in its report Mathematics at the Interface of Computer Science and Industry. Our research on e-science has had an impact both by generating new scientific results, and by producing middleware that is widely used internationally. Genes involved in Graves Disease have been identified, and new insights into the behaviour of B. Anthraticus have been revealed. The researchers have been substantially involved in the design and development of grid middleware - for example the widely used Distributed Query Processing software (OGSA-DQP). Dr. Mark Little, Director of Standards at Redhat (the main open source Linux vendor) has said of our work on Grid computing: "your work has influenced vendor strategies as much as it has been influenced by those strategies, which is refreshing.""Without researchers laying the foundations in Computer Science departments at Brown, CMU, Cambridge, Newcastle, MIT, Vrije, University of Washington and without industrial researchers consolidating basic research results, we would not have the 8.5 billion dollar middleware market in the same form as we have it today" (Emmerich, Aoyama & Sventek, ACM SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 32, 1, Jan. 2007, 21-46)