Paul Townend Email & Phone Number

Umeå, Se

Umeå, Västerbotten, Sweden

Founder of the Green Distributed Computing group at Umeå University in Sweden. Member of the national WASP Graduate School Management group. Research leader within the Umeå Autonomous Distributed Systems Lab. Member of the Umeå Computing Science Research Committee. Examiner/coordinator of a few national PhD courses, coordinate the Umeå University Cloud Computing course (masters level), and supervise 4 PhD students (currently recruiting a 5th). I also run a couple of research (ARISEN) and teaching (CETI) infrastructures with a focus on Cloud-Edge.

SovereignEdge.COGNIT is a major European Union project running for 3 years with 10 partners, aiming to develop a next-generation AI-enabled adaptive serverless cloud-edge platform (open source) for Europe. I am a member of the project executive board, and coordinate the science of the project as a whole.

WARA-Ops is a national research arena funded by WASP. It aims to bring together Swedish industry and academia to solve state-of-the-art challenges in data-driven operational research. I coordinate the science and co-manage the project.

Leeds, United Kingdom

Ran day-to-day operations of the company, wrote and managed research grants, plus a bit of business development.

Leeds, United Kingdom

I was appointed a University Academic Fellow (in Big Data Analytics) at the University of Leeds in April 2015, as part of University's "250 Great Minds"​ campaign. This position was a fast track to "Associate Professor"​ at Leeds, and was intended for established career academics who excel at leadership and research innovation.As part of my position, I actively worked on collaborative research endeavours with local companies in the Data Center sector, pursuing commercialisation (spin-off) activities, and developing research strategy for the next 5 years in the Big Data domain.I created and led a new MSc-level taught module - "Big Data Analytics" - which quickly became the most popular Masters degree module in University of Leeds Computer Science. I also supervised many successful MSc and PhD students, and planned/ran various international conferences and events.

Leeds, United Kingdom

I worked in the Decision Support field for over a decade, including serving as Lead Software Architect and Investigator on the "E3DC" project - a commercial proof-of-concept project aiming to develop state-of-the-art data centre analytics technologies, transitioning research created by my students and myself at the University of Leeds into production technology. This project was the driving force behind my new business - Edgetic Ltd.Prior to this, I worked as lead architect on the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK) funded STRAPP project, working with Rolls Royce Plc. and Cybula Ltd. to develop state-of-the-art provenance support for their decision support systems. This involved writing software to integrate with and enhance Rolls-Royce's Equipment Health Management (EHM) system (for their aircraft engine monitoring systems), and Cybula's Brain Injury Index (BII) system (to provide decision support to neurologists).I also worked on developing web portal based decision support systems for the ESRC funded MOSES and GENESIS projects, which aimed to allow local government and businesses to track and predict demographic changes in defined regions of the UK; this involved developing responsive visualisation systems, integrating the decision support system with back-end cloud-based processing, and developing a cloud-based storage system for end users. My work on this project received a Best Paper award at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, beating over 100 other submissions.

Doctor Of Philosophy (Phd), Computer Science

Master Of Science (Msc), Computer Science

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Computer Science