Mark Burgess (born 19 February 1966) is an independent researcher and writer, formerly professor at

Oslo University College Oslo University College (; HiO) was the largest state university college in Norway from 1994 to 2011, with more than 18,000 students and approximately 1800 employees.

in Norway and creator of the

CFEngine CFEngine is a configuration management system, written by Mark Burgess. Its primary function is to provide automated configuration and maintenance of large-scale computer systems, including the unified management of servers, desktops, consume ...

software and company, who is known for work in computer science in the field of policy-based

configuration management Configuration management (CM) is a management process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. ...

Early life and education

Burgess was born in

Maghull Maghull ( ) is a town and civil parish in Sefton, Merseyside, England. The town is north of Liverpool and west of Kirkby. The town is also the location of Ashworth Hospital. Maghull had a population of 20,444 at the 2011 Census. Housing in th ...

in the United Kingdom to English parents. He grew up in

Bloxham Bloxham is a village and civil parish in northern Oxfordshire several miles from the Cotswolds, about southwest of Banbury. It is on the edge of a valley and overlooked by Hobb Hill. The village is on the A361 road. The 2011 Census recorded ...

, a small village in

Oxfordshire Oxfordshire ( ; abbreviated ''Oxon'') is a ceremonial county in South East England. The county is bordered by Northamptonshire and Warwickshire to the north, Buckinghamshire to the east, Berkshire to the south, and Wiltshire and Glouceste ...

from the age of 5–18, attending Bloxham Primary School, Warriner Secondary School and Banbury Upper School. He studied

astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline, James Keeler, said, astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the ...

at the (then) School of Physics at the

University of Newcastle upon Tyne Newcastle University (legally the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a public university, public research university based in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. It has overseas campuses in Singapore and Malaysia. The university is a red brick un ...

, where he later switched to pure Physics and then Theoretical Physics for his bachelor's degree. He stayed on to obtain a Doctor of Philosophy in Theoretical Physics (

Quantum Field Theory In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework that combines Field theory (physics), field theory and the principle of relativity with ideas behind quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct phy ...

) in Newcastle, in the field of ''Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in Non-Abelian Gauge Theories'', for which he received the Keith Runcorn Prize. Burgess was invited to Norway for a two year Royal Society Post Doctoral fellowship in January 1991 by Professor Finn Ravndal of the

University of Oslo The University of Oslo (; ) is a public university, public research university located in Oslo, Norway. It is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation#Europe, oldest university in Norway. Originally named the Royal Frederick Univ ...

, and stayed on for another two years funded by the Norwegian Research Council. While at the University of Oslo he developed an interest in the behaviour of computers as dynamic systems and began to apply ideas from physics to describe computer behaviour. He subsequently became the first professor with a title in Network and System administration at the same university. In 2023, in response to

Brexit Brexit (, a portmanteau of "Britain" and "Exit") was the Withdrawal from the European Union, withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU). Brexit officially took place at 23:00 GMT on 31 January 2020 (00:00 1 February ...

, Burgess applied for and became a citizen of Norway, following the acceptance of dual citizenship in Norway. Burgess is perhaps best known as the author of the popular

software package

, but has also made important contributions to the theory of the field of automation and policy based management, including the idea of operator convergence and

promise theory Promise theory is a method of analysis suitable for studying any system of interacting components. In the context of information science, promise theory offers a methodology for organising and understanding systems by modelling voluntary coop ...

Career

Burgess has made contributions to theoretical and empirical computer science, mainly in the area of the behaviour of computing infrastructure and services. In the early 1990s, Burgess asserted that programmatic models of computer programs could not describe observed behaviour at the macroscopic scale, and that statistical physics could be used instead, thus likening artificial systems to a quasi-natural phenomenon. With the increasing interest in the role of information in physics, Burgess has argued that computer science and physics can be bridged using the concepts of

, through the notion of semantic spacetime, a description of functional aspects of spacetime at multiple scales, which offers an alternative to

Robin Milner Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner (13 January 1934 – 20 March 2010) was a British computer scientist, and a Turing Award winner.bigraphs.

Configuration

In 1993, Burgess introduced the software

based in intuitions and practice, focusing on the idea of repeatable desired end-state 'convergence', to manage system configuration. The term convergence, used by Burgess, is now often inaccurately just called

idempotence Idempotence (, ) is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application. The concept of idempotence arises in a number of pl ...

, as convergence in his meaning implied both desired end-state and idempotence of an error correction operator at the desired end-state. Shifting interest from Theoretical Physics to Computer Science, Burgess then began to explore the ad hoc choices initially made, and set out to find a scientific method for understanding such choices in computing systems.

Computer immunology, anomaly detection, and machine learning

Following a position paper 'manifesto' pointing out the research challenges needed to make self-repairing systems, Burgess undertook to study computer systems as a number of empirical phenomena, taking an approach based on physics to learn first about the scales and patterns. The idea of self-healing, or self-maintaining systems was originally referred to as Computer Immunology, as it was inspired by research into the Danger model of human immune systems. The empirical studies were published in various formats between 1999 and 2003, culminating in a journal summary review, and a more practical method for automated machine learning of system behavioural characters. This incorporated the idea of so-called

exponential smoothing Exponential smoothing or exponential moving average (EMA) is a rule of thumb technique for smoothing time series data using the exponential window function. Whereas in the simple moving average the past observations are weighted equally, exponen ...

(which was called a geometric average) for fast learning, along with a two-dimensional, cylindrical time model which was based on the result that network client-server traffic would be expected to behave like a quasi-periodic stochastic function (a characteristic of a system driven close to equilibrium). The notion of an equilibrium or steady state operation thus became the baseline, replacing arbitrary thresholds used in the monitoring software of the day. The software

became the proof of concept platform using these methods for system state anomaly detection, from 2002 to the present, and received widespread use.

Theoretical models

Based on these fundamental empirical studies, Burgess argued for two kinds of theoretical model to describe systems, which he called type 1 and type 2. Type 1 models were dynamical performance models that described machines as changing phenomena. Type 2 were semantic models, concerning the efficacy and influence of human decisions on behaviour, called ''policy'', or desired-state computing. He later developed these further and made connection with

Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and the man who laid the foundations of th ...

's work on error correction in a paper discussing how separation of timescales plays an important role in computer science, by analogy with physics. With Trond Reitan, Burgess showed that the question of when was the optimal time to backup data could be answered scientifically. The studies carried out between 1998 and 2002 led to a monograph ''Analytical Network and System Administration: Managing Human-Computer Systems''. Although quite comprehensive about some aspects of systems, Burgess identified a missing piece to the story, namely how to describe distributed co-operation between computers in networks. This prompted later work, which became Promise Theory,J.A. Bergstra and M. Burgess, Promise Theory: Principles and Applications, XtAxis press 2014 proposed at the Distributed Systems, Operations and Management conference in Barcelona in 2005.M. Burgess, An Approach to Understanding Policy Based on Autonomy and Voluntary Cooperation
Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 3775, 2005, pp 97–108 The computer science community has had a mixed response to the hybrid nature of the infrastructure work, which seemed to view as being somewhere between traditional computing and physics. However, by now it has become almost ubiquitous, and its approaches and results are in general use.

Promise theory

Promise theory Promise theory is a method of analysis suitable for studying any system of interacting components. In the context of information science, promise theory offers a methodology for organising and understanding systems by modelling voluntary coop ...

was introduced as a model of voluntary co-operation between agents, in 2004, for understanding human-computer systems with complex interactions, and was later developed with Dutch computer scientist and friend

Jan Bergstra Johannes Aldert "Jan" Bergstra (born 1951) is a Dutch computer scientist. His work has focused on logic and the theoretical foundations of software engineering, especially on formal methods for system design. He is best known as an expert on algeb ...

into a book. Interest in promise theory has grown in the IT industry, with several products citing it.

Semantic spacetime

As an application of promise theory, which makes contact with knowledge representation and artificial reasoning, Burgess introduced the concept of semantic spacetime, which applies semantics to graph theoretical models of connected regions, from computer networks to smart cities. Semantic spacetime is a theoretical framework for

agent-based model An agent-based model (ABM) is a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents (both individual or collective entities such as organizations or groups) in order to understand the behavior of a system and ...

ling of

spacetime In physics, spacetime, also called the space-time continuum, is a mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. Spacetime diagrams are useful in visualiz ...

, based on

. It is relevant both as a model of Computer Science and of Physics. Semantic Spacetime was introduced by Mark Burgess, in a series of papers, as an alternative to describing space and time, initially for Computer Science, after finding earlier models by Milner and others to be wanting. It attempts to unify both quantitative and qualitative aspects of spacetime processes into a single model. This is referred to by Burgess as covering both “dynamics and semantics”. In 2019, Burgess wrote a book called ‘’Smart Spacetime’’ to explain the vision behind Semantic Spacetime, as well as point out `deep connections’ to other fields. Commentators have likened the idea to other graph theoretic models of spacetime, such as Quantum Graphity and the Wolfram Physics Project. In physics, spacetime is a purely quantitative description of metric coordinates to map out a region or a volume; but in Information Sciences spacetime may also have

semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

, or ‘’qualitative’’ functional aspects that also need to be included in descriptions of phenomena.

Graph theoretical ideas

Another recurring theme of Burgess's work has been graph theory. Working with search engine researchers Geoffrey Canright and Knut Engø Monsen, Burgess developed a page ranking algorithm similar to

PageRank PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. Accordin ...

eigenvalue sink remedies in directed graphs. This work also met with resistance from the American journal establishment, and was delayed before final publication. With PhD Student Kyrre Begnum, he explored the related technique of

Principal Component Analysis Principal component analysis (PCA) is a linear dimensionality reduction technique with applications in exploratory data analysis, visualization and data preprocessing. The data is linearly transformed onto a new coordinate system such that th ...

for analysing correlations in the machine-learned anomalies described above. Graphs as a model of security made another connection with physics, through the idea of percolation, or path criticality.

Knowledge management

Since 2007, Burgess has turned his attention to the matter of knowledge representations and knowledge management, often using Promise Theory as an agency model.

Music and media

Burgess is an accomplished guitarist, and a composer of various styles of music from orchestral to jazz, rock and pop, which he has published amateur music freely and released a number of albums on streaming platforms. He is also an amateur oil painter and occasional digital artist. During the 2020 pandemic, Burgess produced a “zero budget” series of three documentary films called Bigger, Faster, Smarter in which he interviewed a number of industry luminaries about the nature of processes in space and time, networks, and the future of technology. The series was written, filmed, narrated and edited entirely by Burgess. He also composed and performed the music for the series.

Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Burgess, Mark 1966 births Alumni of Newcastle University British computer scientists Living people People from Maghull