John Darlington is a British academic, researcher, and writer. He was a retired professor at Imperial College London. He led the London e-Science Centre and was in charge of the Functional Programming and Social Computing Sections at Imperial.

Darlington is known for his early work on program transformation and functional programming. In his thesis from 1972, Darlington introduced the concept of program transformation, which means changing programs into different forms while keeping their meaning the same but changing how they operate.

Early life and education

Darlington earned his B.Sc. (Econ) in 1969 from the London School of Economics. He also earned his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the Department of Machine Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh in 1973. From 1973 to 1977, he worked as a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Later, he served as a visiting research fellow at IBM Yorktown Heights and at the Stanford Research Institute.

Career

In 1977, Darlington began working at Imperial College as a lecturer in the Department of Computing. He was promoted to reader in 1982 and became a full professor in 1985. At Imperial College, he served as director of several centers focused on advancing the use of parallel and innovative computer designs. These centers included the Imperial College/Fujitsu Parallel Computing Research Centre (1994–2000), the Imperial College Parallel Computing Centre (1996–2002), the London e-Science Centre (2002–2005), and the Imperial College Internet Centre (2005–2008).

In 2015, Darlington was named an emeritus professor at Imperial College. He retired in 2016 at the age of 69.

Research and work

Darlington is known for his early work in program transformation and functional programming. In his 1972 thesis, he introduced the idea of program transformation, which means changing programs into different forms while keeping their meaning the same but changing how they work. Later, he worked with his supervisor, Rod Burstall, to create the unfold/fold calculus, a system of six rules for transforming programs. This system became a classic foundation for many areas of research that continue today. Together, Burstall and Darlington developed a new functional programming language called NPL, based on Kleene Recursion Equations. This language contributed to the development of pure functional programming with multi-equations and pattern matching.

Darlington supported the use of functional programming languages and the declarative approach. In 1977, he founded and led the Functional Programming Section at Imperial College’s Department of Computing. He also served on IFIP Working Group 2.8 and helped develop Hope+, an extension of the language Hope, which followed NPL. His early work helped prepare the way for later developments like Haskell.

Darlington’s key idea was that, with the right notation, computer programs could be treated as mathematical objects that could be formally changed. This approach led to important innovations, including parallel machine design, the ALICE functional graph reduction machine (1985), which influenced the ICL Goldrush parallel database machine (1992); coordination forms (1996), similar to map/reduce and market-based service computing; and collaborations with Sun Microsystems, similar to cloud computing.

Darlington’s research in parallel computing led Fujitsu to establish the Imperial College/Fujitsu Parallel Computing Research Centre in 1994, opened by HRH the Princess Royal. Fujitsu donated a 128-processor AP1000 machine worth over £1 million. With Darlington as director, the centre ran an open program for developing parallel applications. This work continued through the Imperial College Parallel Computing Centre (1996–2002), the London e-Science Centre (2002–2005), and the Imperial College Internet Centre (2005–2008).

The UK e-Science programme began in 2001, with the London e-Science Centre (LeSC) as a regional hub. LeSC worked on many projects, including materials modeling, protein folding, climate modeling, pollution monitoring, workflow management, data handling, particle physics, health data analysis, and brain imaging.

The Internet Centre, founded in 2005 with funding from Imperial College, focused on the economic and social aspects of the Internet. It partnered with organizations like Vodafone, the BBC, Transport for London, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the RCA, and the Science Museum.

Darlington worked with industry on projects through the UK Technology Strategy Board, Innovate UK, and European initiatives. He applied ideas from functional programming and cloud computing to create applications in media processing, internet services, and public health. He also developed methods to combine functional languages with traditional software systems.

Selected publications

• A system that helps improve computer programs automatically. J. Darlington, R. M. Burstall. Acta Informatica, Vol. 6, pp. 41–60, 1976.
• A system to create programs that repeat steps. R. M. Burstall, J. Darlington. Journal of the ACM (JACM) 24 (1), 44-67. 1977.
• Ideas for designing a programming language that uses functions. R. M. Burstall. Infotech State of the Art Conference: The Software Revolution, Copenhagen, October, 1977.
• Hope+ (Nigel Perry, The Implementation of Practical Functional Programming Languages, PhD Thesis, University of London, 1991)
• The design and use of ALICE, a machine that processes data in parallel. M. Cripps, J. Darlington, A. J. Field, P. G. Harrison, M. J. Reeve. Selected Reprints on Dataflow and Reduction Architectures, pp 300–32, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1987, ISBN 0818607599.
• Tools to help programs work together in parallel. J. Darlington, Y. Guo, H. W. To, and J. Yang. In EURO-PAR’95 Parallel Processing, pages 55–69. Springer-Verlag, 1995.
• A plan for the internet using Web Services and Utility Computing. J. Darlington, J. Cohen and W. Lee. In Third International Workshop on Emerging Technologies for Next-generation GRID (ETNGRID 2006), WETICE-2006, p. 169 – 174, Manchester, UK, Jun 2006.
• Ways to handle payments and agreements for the next generation Grid and Web. J. Cohen, J. Darlington, W. Lee. Concurrency and Computation – Practice and Experience, Vol. 20, Pages: 239-251, 2008, ISSN 1532-0626. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cpe.1196
• Imperial’s vision may change how the internet works. A. Baxter. Financial Times, Digital Business, November 22, 2005.
• RAPPORT: running scientific programs on the cloud. J. Cohen, I. Fillipis, M. Woodbridge et al. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A -Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences, Vol:371, 2013, ISSN 1364-503X. doi: 10.1098/rsta.2012.0073
• Solving complex problems in high performance computing. J. Darlington, A. J. Field, L. Hakim. International Journal of Parallel Programming, pp. 1–19, March 2016, ISSN 0885-7458. doi: 10.1007/s10766-016-0422-9