John Darlington on starting the Research Hardware Engineering community

Hi,

My name is John Darlington and I work in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

I have had a broad ranging career within the tech industry and academia. After graduating with a degree in Computer Science  I joined IBM working initially on computer graphics before moving into operating system development for the Personal Computer. Following technical roles ranging from development, test and build and integration I moved into line management, eventually become product manager for one of the CICS family of Transaction Processing middleware. Realising that the success of my product relied as much on customers and our own engineering I moved into marketing and eventually became one the global brand managers for CICS. 

I left IBM to join Microsoft to lead the video development group within Windows and then to Sony to lead teams working on professional video production products. After Sony I held Board roles as CTO and CEO in start up companies in medical imaging and advanced search where I worked on early techniques to generate language summaries instead of results lists. 

I was invited to join Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton to help create an Entrepreneurial culture and to develop collaborative relationships. I helped establish the Arm ECS Research Centre which has been an ongoing collaboration for over 18 years. I also lead a team providing semiconductor fabrication services using the University’s wafer fab.  My interests at Southampton cover everything from new materials through device fabrication and physical IP up through hardware design and the software stack to the cloud and global infrastructures such as the World Wide Web. This included working with Dame Wendy Hall and Sir Tim Berners Lee in getting the UK government to open up data to be a national infrastructure and more recently on artificial intelligence and data science. 

I am one of the founders of SoC Labs, an academic community with nearly 100 universities that utilise the arm ecosystem to support community driven hardware design. I am active in developing re-usable SoC reference designs and helping engage the academic hardware design community globally. Working at Southampton and in the global academic community I get to work with some great people. 

One of them is Simon Hettrick, one of the founders of the Research Software Engineering community and I have always admired the global community it has become. I have along with a few others have always thought that something similar should be done for the Research Hardware Engineering Community and so we have decided to initiate that community.

I hope you will join us and make the Research Hardware Engineering Community and vibrant as the Research Software Engineering community.