Biography

Born in Bangladesh in 1938, Professor S. M. Deen gained his PhD in Particle Physics from Imperial College, London in1965, having been graduated previously from the University of Dhaka. Subsequently he was engaged in physics research for a number of years, first in the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and then in the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory, England. He worked in SCICON computer consultancy company before moving to the Computing Science Department of the University of Aberdeen in 1973, where he founded the PRECI database research group. He left Aberdeen in 1986 to take up a Chair in Computer Science at the University of Keele, where he established and led the Data and Knowledge Engineering (DAKE) research group. He has retired in October, 2005, but is still working in the DAKE area of research at Keele as Emeritus Professor.

Research and scholarship

He established a database research group at Aberdeen in 1977 and led the internationally known PRECI database research project, with funding from SERC and EU.

  1. The architecture developed in the PRECI project (1981-86) at Aberdeen still remains the most general architecture for distributed databases. This architecture had been in the syllabus of the database course at Stanford, and was published in a book produced by the MIT [A. Gupta (Sloan School of Management)] as a major contribution in the late eighties.

  2. Semantic differences in heterogeneous distributed databases was first identified as a problem area in one of his papers in 1987, and it is now a major area of study under semantic interoperability all over the world.

His DAKE research group at Keele became a centre of excellence in Europe, supported by the EU ESPRIT (MODELAGE and Agent-Link projects), and the DTI and Industries. Toshiba of Japan used to make an annual contribution for advice and copies of technical reports. The large projects in which the DAKE group participated were the ESPRIT/IMAGINE project (1990 – 94) on CKBS (coordinated by Siemens) and the EU/HMS (Holonic Manufacturing Systems) project (1994 – 2001 ) on agent-based manufacturing for low-volume high variety products. The participants in the HMS project included major manufacturers from the developed world, eg. BHP from Australia, Toshiba, Hitachi, Fanuc from Japan, DaimlerChrysler from Europe, Rockwell Automation from the USA. This was the largest international research project (100 million dollars) on agent-based manufacturing-science. The DAKE group developed the theoretical model for agent based manufacturing for the HMS project. His book (editor) "Agent-based Manufacturing – the Holonic Approach" [Springer] is an outcome of this project.

Currently apart from being an Emeritus Professor at Keele, he is also acting as Visiting Professor at the University of Coventry. His present area of research interest is the application of agent-approach on P2P Data/Knowledge Sharing Systems, in collaboration of Coventry University and Prof M. Takizawa of Japan, who has been a Visiting Professor to his DAKE Group for many years.

Further information

Misbah Deen Personal web pages

School of Computer Science and Mathematics
Keele University
Staffordshire
ST5 5AA