csperkins.org

EPSRC Engineering for a Prosperous Nation Workshop

I attended the mid-term review workshop for projects funded under the EPSRC Engineering for a Prosperous Nation call, held at the Law Society in London earlier today.

My work on Improving Protocol Standards for a more Trustworthy Internet is funded under this programme, and I was pleased to present a brief status report at the workshop. This highlighted our success in building initial tools to extract protocol data unit format specifications from Internet RFCs and generate code to parse such data, and other ongoing work to introduce the ideas of automated processing, testing, and code generation based on protocol standards documents into the IETF.

The workshop also included a review of the EPSRC delivery plan, and some interesting discussions on the relationship between the many different projects funded under the call, the various EPSRC prosperity outcomes, and the potential for future activities under follow-on calls. The wide range of different projects funded under the call was impressive – the remit of the call seemed broad, but I hadn't appreciated just how wide ranging were the funded projects: from our work on improving robustness of the Internet infrastructure, to self-driving cars, batteries, low-carbon glass manufacturing, and healthcare, to mention just a few. The range of topics made pitching the presentation difficult, but certainly led to some interesting discussions.