School of Computer Science

Telephone: +44 (0) 121 41-48819 Email:

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Research interests

I am interested in game semantics and its applications: program verification, program analysis, specification logics, hardware synthesis. The most accessible introductions to my research are the following two tutorial papers:

• An introduction to and history of Game Semantics: Applications of Game Semantics: From Software Analysis to Hardware Synthesis LICS 2009 (invited tutorial paper), Twenty-Fourth Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, Los Angeles, California, USA.
• An introduction to the Geometry of Synthesis, a new way of synthesising digital circuits using semantic concepts: Function Interface Models for Hardware Compilation (invited tutorial paper) MEMOCODE 2011. ACM/IEEE Ninth International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for Codesign Cambridge, UK. July 11-13, 2011

If you are interested in doing a PhD in this area you should read this then e-mail me. Application procedures are described here.

Publications

Most of my publications (DBLP) are available on-line.

Research Group

• Dr. Adam Bakewell, Research Fellow
• Mohamed Menaa, Doctoral Student
• Alex Smith, Doctoral Student
• Zaid Al-Zobaidi, Doctoral Student

Tools

I was involved in the development of several game-based verification tools. Two of them are available for download:

• Mage: the state of the art tool, which uses on-the fly model checking and approximation refinement;
• GameChecker: an earlier tool which uses FDR as a back end. It supports unbounded integers.

Groups

I am a member of the local Verification, Principles of Programming and Modelling research Groups.

Grants

• Epsrc EP/D070880/1: A Unified Approach to Compositional Software Modelling, Analysis and Verification (Advanced Fellowship)
• Epsrc EP/E010180/1: The role of language covers in games-based abstraction and refinement (visiting grant for Mike Domaratzki)
• Epsrc EP/D034906/1: Modular Abstraction and Abstraction Refinement: A Game-Semantic Approach (principal investigator)

Other research-related activities

• Invited tutorial speaker LICS 2009
• Program Committee member TLCA 2009, FOSSACS 2008, 2009, LICS 2010.
• Co-chair of the Games for Logic and Programming Languages Workshop III @ Etaps 2008.
• Guest editor of the special issue of APAL on game semantics.
• PC member for the Games in Design and Verification Workshop @ CAV 2005.

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