User:Martin-Hamilton/sandbox

Martin Hamilton is a British computer scientist. He is Principal at martinh.net, a digital innovation consulting practice.

A native of Llandudno in North Wales, he graduated from Loughborough University in 1992 and went on to work there as an Internet researcher and IT manager before founding the HPC Midlands supercomputer centre in 2012. Hamilton was recruited by Jisc in 2014 to lead their innovation lab. In 2020 he left Jisc to start his own consulting practice.

Internet researcher
Hamilton began his career researching how IP multicast could be applied to Internet resource discovery, such as allowing massively parallel searching of multiple databases. As part of this work he was active in a number of Internet Engineering Task Force working groups, ultimately co-authoring RFC 2219 which established the "www." convention for naming websites.

eLib ROADS project
Hamilton's activities caught the attention of UKOLN's Lorcan Dempsey, who was putting together a project proposal with the University of Bristol's Institute for Learning and Research Technology for eLib, the UK electronic libraries programme. A key outcome of the Follett Report, eLib sought to catalyse the potential of the Internet and wider digital technologies such as CD-ROMs to transform the UK's academic libraries. They would go on to secure funding for a project called Resource Organisation and Discovery in Subject-based services (ROADS) which created search and retrieval infrastructure underpinning a number of other eLib projects, using the IETF's nascent WHOIS++ protocol.

JANET Web Cache Service
Hamilton's research on scaling of Internet services had included a significant element on network level caching of resources, which suddenly became crucially important as the World-Wide Web started to see mass adoption in the late 1990s. Hamilton and colleagues from Manchester Computing at the University of Manchester developed a proposal to Jisc to operate a national scale web caching facility for UK research and education which would be known as the JANET Web Cache Service (JWCS). At its peak virtually all UK universities routed their international web browsing through the JWCS to minimise charges due to bandwidth usage. The JWCS operated from 1997-2002, being decommissioned as international connectivity ceased to be prohibitively expensive after the dot-com bubble burst.

Google Apps for Education
With the closure of JWCS, Hamilton moved into an internal facing role at Loughborough for several years, leading on the campus network and infrastructure services. By 2008 it had become clear that the University's self-hosted email facilities were struggling to cope with demand, and there was significant interest in exploring emerging cloud computing options such as Microsoft's Exchange Labs (subsequently Office365) and Google Apps for Education (subsequently G Suite). Following extensive consultation the Google option was selected, making Loughborough one of the first UK universities to migrate production workloads to cloud services. Following significant community interest in the project, Hamilton co-founded a series of Google in education UK and European user group conferences which were held in Loughborough (GUUG11), Portsmouth (GEUG12) and York (GEUG14).

HPC Midlands
From 2012 to 2014, Hamilton set up and ran HPC Midlands, a new Tier 2 supercomputing centre of excellence funded by a £1.4m grant from UK research council EPSRC to Loughborough University and the University of Leicester. HPC Midlands was unusual for an academic High Performance Computing centre in that it had an explicit focus on use by academia and industry, and a highly evolved information security model with security cleared staff that permitted export controlled work to take place on the system. Hamilton recruited customers from across industry including major firms such as Rolls-Royce and E.ON.

Futurist @ Jisc
From 2014-2020, Hamilton worked for Jisc as a Futurist, leading their innovation lab and steering the direction of the company's overall R&D activities. Hamilton developed a number of new Jisc services, including a national agreement for industry use of HPC services and a procurement framework for virtual reality and augmented reality services for use by research and education. He also worked extensively with education technology (edtech) startups that Jisc was supporting in their Edtech Launchpad programme.

Hamilton co-chaired the UK national e-Infrastructure Project Directors' Group and UKRI Cloud Computing for Research working group and led on a number of influential surveys and reports on research infrastructures. During this period he was also a judge for the Times Higher Education Awards and the co-creator of the [https://edtechnology.co.uk/latest-news/edtech-50-schools-2019/#:~:text=The%20EdTech%2050%20Awards%20celebrates%20every%20teacher%2C%20educational%20project%20and,insight%20of%20our%20judging%20panel. Edtech 50 Awards], and wrote and presented extensively about the future of technologies such as blockchain in research and education.

martinh.net
In January 2020 Hamilton left Jisc to start his own digital innovation consulting practice focussed on research and education. In this role he has been advising edtech startups on their business models and how to secure funding from sources such as Innovate UK, project manages the ExCALIBUR Hardware and Enabling Software Exascale supercomputing pathfinder programme for UKRI and works as regional lead for the Department for Education's Edtech Demonstrator initiative.

Awards
Hamilton was made a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2008, in recognition of his contributions to the field.