Title: Formal Methods: A Historical Perspective

Speaker：Prof. Cliff Jones

                 Department of Computer Science, Newcastle University

Time: 10:00am, Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Venue: Room 334, Building 5, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract:

It is often useful to know the historical context of a subject in order to see where it is going. Some time ago, I published a paper on the early work on program verification; currently, I’m working with a PhD student on the history of formal language descriptions. Having worked myself in this area since the 1960s, I know many of the people involved. This talk will attempt to communicate the main threads, their interactions and some lesser known anecdotes.

Bio of the speaker:

Cliff Jones is Professor of Computing Science at Newcastle University. He is best known for his research into "formal methods" for the design and verification of computer systems; under this heading, current topics of research include concurrency, support systems and logics. He also has an interest in the history of formal methods.

As well as his academic career, Cliff has spent over twenty years in industry (which might explain why "applicability" is an issue in most of his research). His fifteen years in IBM saw, among other things, the creation -with colleagues in the Vienna Lab- of VDM which is one of the better known "formal methods". Under Tony Hoare, Cliff wrote his Oxford doctoral thesis in two years. From Oxford, he moved directly to a chair at Manchester University where he built a world-class Formal Methods group. In 1996 he moved to Harlequin, directing some fifty developers on Information Management projects and finally became overall Technical Director before leaving to re-join academia in 1999.

Cliff is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), ACM, BCS, and IET. In 2015 he was made the first Fellow of the Formal Methods (Europe) group. He has been a member of IFIP Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology) since 1973 and was Chair from 1987-96.