Nik Looker is a Software Tech Lead working in the semi-conductor sector in Cambridge. He has worked in the fields of Distributed Systems, Operating Systems and Embedded Applications for 20 years. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Durham University and a BSc in Computing from Oxford Brookes University.
He pursued a successful career in industry focusing mainly on small footprint embedded mobile telecommunications systems and test equipment until, in 1999, he moved to Wind River Systems to work on their embedded distributed products and their RTOS kernel (VxWorks). At Wind River he made major contributions to implementing and testing several of their kernel releases.
In 2002 he moved to Durham University to undertake research in Middleware Dependability Assessment and in 2006 he moved to the University of Leeds to join the Distributed Systems and Services group to work on the NECTISE Project and the CoLaB Collaboration between Beihang University and the University of Leeds. In 2008 he moved back to Durham University to work on the High Resolution Spectrometer for SALT and the CANARY adaptive optics system. He has also been involved in the eDemand project and as a Teaching Fellow on the ALiC project.
He has published many conference and journal papers on dependability and has served on numerous program committees for international conferences and workshops.