Prof Graham Kirby

Prof Graham Kirby

Professor

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 3240
Email
graham.kirby@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

I've worked in Computer Science at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø since 1991, initially as a research assistant, and then lecturing since 1999. Within the School I've been Adviser of Studies, Admissions Officer and Director of Teaching. At Faculty level I held the roles of Pro Dean Advising and then Associate Dean Students from 2016-22, and jointly the role of Acting Dean of Science for six months in 2019.

Teaching

In 2025-26 I'm teaching on CS1002 (Object-Oriented Programming) and CS5035 (Software Quality). For the latter I conducted an which received some interesting responses.

For current students: here are some for Honours and MSc projects in 2025-26.

Research areas

I was involved in the ESRC-funded project, which aimed to construct a linked genealogy of Scottish historical records, with ,  and  at Edinburgh, and Alan Dearle and Ã–zgür Akgün in Computer Science at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø. This work also included  and  at Cambridge, and  at ANU.

I previously led a work package on linkage methodology within the ESRC-funded , with Alan Dearle, Ã–zgür Akgün,  and Alasdair Gray.

I'm co-supervisor, with Richard Connor, for , who is working on high-dimensional search.

I'm also interested in distributed systems and programming languages in general.

Previous PhD Students

  •  (2022): handling uncertainty in data linkage, with a focus on using  for evaluating population linkage approaches. Reported in his thesis .
  •  (2018): investigated user models for managing distributed data, reported in his thesis: .
  •  (2014): did his PhD work on . He has published his  software, which is an adaptive P2P overlay, and , which is a very light-weight Java tool that monitors a set of machines and ensures that some given application remains running on them.
  •  (2010): applied autonomic management to distributed storage systems. He looked at autonomic control of maintenance scheduling in Chord, and of replica retrieval concurrency in a simple distributed block storage system. The work is reported in papers at DANMS 2011 and Self-Adaptive Networking 2010 and in his thesis: .
  •  (2003): addressed the problem of how to configure a software system with a large number of tuning parameters. He developed a tool to automatically run performance tests using various parameter values, so that the best combination of parameter values could be selected. Clearly exhaustive search is impractical due to the combinatorial explosion in the number of possible combinations; this problem is exacerbated by the fact that in a non-trivial system it may take a relatively long time to conduct each test – in the case study of an industrial mail server, each test took 30 minutes. He used Taguchi’s Design of Experiments approach to select a very small sub-set of combinations from which reasonable conclusions could still be drawn. The work is reported in a paper at CDSA 2001 and in his thesis: .

Second Supervisor

  •  (2018). Thesis: 
  •  (2015). Thesis: 
  •  (2013). Thesis: 
  •  (2012). Thesis: 
  •  (2012). Thesis: 
  •  (2010). Thesis: 
  •  (2006). Thesis: 
  •  (2001). Thesis: 

Previous Projects

  • H2O: autonomic resource-harvesting database
  • ASA: secure location-independent autonomic storage architectures
  • RAFDA: reflective architecture for distributed applications
  • DIAS: evolving sensornet design through co-design
  • ACT: automatic configuration testing
  • Archware: architecting evolvable software
  • GLOSS: global smart spaces
  • XBase: generic storage architecture
  • orthogonal persistence, hyper-programming and linguistic reflection

PhD supervision

  • Kamyar Babazadeh

Selected publications

  • Open access
    Dearle, A., Kirby, G. N. C. & Akgun, O., 5 Jul 2023, Proceedings of the 31st symposium of advanced database systems: Galzingano Terme, Padua, Italy, July 2nd to 5th, 2023. Diamantini, C., Faggioli, G., Ferro, N., Marchesin, S., Silvello, G. & Tanca, L. (eds.). Sun SITE Central Europe, p. 291-302 12 p. (CEUR workshop proceedings).

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

  • Open access
    Lasselle, L., Schelfhout, S., Fonteyne, L., Kirby, G., Smith, I. & Duyck, W., 24 Sept 2021, In: PLoS ONE. 16, 9, 18 p., e0257723.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

  • Open access
    Taalas, P., Grönlund, A., Pagèze, J., Coly-Layani, L., Fitzpatrick, M., Minescu, A., Rossi, M., Pérez-Llantada, C., Villarroya-Gaudó, M., Herranz, A., Gunnlaugson, G., Svalfors, U., Cullhed, M., Håkansson, L., Skaletska, Z., Chovnyuk, L., Osypchuk, A., Peddie, C., Kirby, G. & Bretherton, A. & 1 others, Peterbauer, H., 16 Mar 2020, European University Association, 11 p. (Learning and Teaching Papers; no. 9).

    Research output: Working paper

  • Open access
    Akgün, Ö., Dearle, A., Kirby, G. N. C., Garrett, E., Dalton, T. S., Christen, P., Dibben, C. J. L. & Williamson, L. E. P., 2 Apr 2020, In: Historical Methods: a Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History. 53, 2, p. 130-146 17 p.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

  • Lasselle, L. S. Z. & Kirby, G. N. C., Sept 2019.

    Research output: Contribution to conference › Paper › peer-review

  • Open access
    Dearle, A., Kirby, G. N. C., Lee, W. & Dibben, C., 20 Jun 2018. 1 p.

    Research output: Contribution to conference › Paper › peer-review

  • Open access
    Akgün, Ö., Dearle, A., Kirby, G. N. C. & Christen, P., 2018, Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 22nd Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2018, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, June 3-6, 2018, Proceedings, Part III. Phung, D., Tseng, V. S., Webb, G., Ho, B., Ganji, M. & Rashidi, L. (eds.). Cham: Springer, p. 89-101 13 p. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); vol. 10939 LNCS).

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

  • Open access
    Dalton, T. S., Kirby, G. N. C., Dearle, A., Akgun, O. & MacKenzie, M. L., 11 Jun 2018. 1 p.

    Research output: Contribution to conference › Paper › peer-review

  • Akgun, O., Al-Sidiqi, A., Christen, P., Dalton, T. S., Dearle, A., Dibben, C. J. L., Garrett, E., Gray, A., Kirby, G. N. C. & Reid, A., 2 Apr 2017.

    Research output: Contribution to conference › Abstract › peer-review

  • Dalton, T. S., Akgun, O., Al-Sediqi, A., Christen, P., Dearle, A., Garrett, E., Gray, A., Kirby, G. N. C. & Reid, A., 2 Apr 2017.

    Research output: Contribution to conference › Abstract › peer-review