person · draft
Gordon Blair
Lancaster University computer scientist in distributed systems who turned to environmental data science and wrote an influential 2021 piece on digital twins of the natural environment.
Gordon Blair is a Distinguished Professor of Distributed Systems in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, now emeritus.1 He took his BSc and PhD in computer science at Strathclyde in 1980 and 1983.1,2 His research is on the middleware that underpins complex distributed systems, including reflective and adaptive middleware, model-driven engineering and interoperability, and he is a co-author of the textbook Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design.1,2
He has applied this to environmental science: how cloud computing, the Internet of Things and data science can help it respond to climate change.1 He co-founded the Centre of Excellence in Environmental Data Science (CEEDS), a joint initiative of Lancaster and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and held an EPSRC Senior Fellowship in Digital Technology and Living with Environmental Change.1 In 2019 he and Keith Beven, with others, revisited Beven's idea of "models of everywhere".3
This wiki carries his 2021 opinion piece Digital twins of the natural environment.3 The 2026 paper Digital twins as a tool for ecosystem research builds on its "jam sandwich" of building blocks. For Keith Beven, see his entry.
- affiliation
- Lancaster University
- role
- computer scientist
- homepage
- https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/scc/about-us/people/gordon-blair
makes
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Gordon Blair's short 2021 opinion piece asks whether a twin of the natural environment is just a model or just data assimilation, and sets out its building blocks as a "jam sandwich".
Tags: distributed systems, environmental data science