He was director of the London e-Science Centre and was head of the Functional Programming and Social Computing Sections at Imperial.

At Imperial College, he held several positions as director of centres aimed at developing the application of parallel and novel computer architectures.

Darlington’s early unifying insight was to show that, with the right notation, computer programs could be treated as mathematical, formally manipulable, objects.

[14] Fujitsu donated a novel 128 processor AP1000 machine, valued at over £1M, and the centre, with Darlington as director, operated an open multi-disciplinary parallel application development programme.

The Internet Centre developed collaborations with a range of commercial and public organisations including: Vodafone, the BBC, Transport for London, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the RCA and the Science Museum.

Darlington has collaborated with industry in a number of UK Technology Strategy Board and Innovate UK and European projects, applying ideas in functional-based software and cloud computing, that have developed a range of innovative applications in media processing, internet cloud services and public health.