Mark Burgess (computer scientist)

Mark Burgess (born 19 February 1966) is an independent researcher and writer, formerly professor at Oslo University College in Norway and creator of the CFEngine software and company, who is known for work in computer science in the field of policy-based configuration management.

Burgess was born in Maghull in the United Kingdom to English parents. He grew up in Bloxham, a small village in Oxfordshire from the age of 5-18, attending Bloxham Primary School, Warriner Secondary School and Banbury Upper School. He studied astrophysics at the (then) School of Physics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 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 in Newcastle, in the field of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in Non-Abelian Gauge Theories, for which he received the Runcorn Prize.

Burgess pursued a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Oslo in Norway, where he later became the first professor with a title in Network and System administration. 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.

Burgess is perhaps best known as the author of the popular configuration management software package CFEngine, 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.

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 promise theory, through the notion of semantic spacetime, a description of functional aspects of spacetime at multiple scales, which offers an alternative to Robin Milner's theory of bigraphs.

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