New job for 2012: After 9 years at Lancaster I’m now at the University of St Andrews, having taken a Research Fellow position here to work with Al Dearle and Simon Dobson on the foundations of WSN systems. St Andrews is one of the oldest universities in the English-speaking world, alongside Oxford and Cambridge, and is located about 60 miles north of Edinburgh.

I’m looking forward to a challenging and exciting 3 years ahead!

So the final review meeting of the WISEBED project that I worked on was yesterday, marking the end of a highly successful three year research project that has seen the development of WSN testbeds around Europe and has supported the birth of a number of new technologies including Lorien. At the review meeting the project was awarded the highest rating by the European Commission review board and many of the testbeds hope to remain operational over the coming years with potential to expand the federation further in the same vein as PlanetLab.

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The next major release of Lorien is out now. This one comes with the first iteration of a simple component-oriented language layer to ease the programming of fundamentally dynamic component systems.

It also features a standardised fundamentals ("kernel") package and applies Lorien’s persistent evolvable meta-architecture approach down to the dynamic interrupt table and system entry point, providing an even more uniformly applied system model.

With node-level technology now having reached a good level of maturity we’ll be starting to build higher-level services for simple evolvable networks and component management soon…

We’re used to giant “smoking = death” labels in Europe, but I found this a particularly creative collection of messages: