Cliff B. Jones
Abstraction for concurrency
Abstraction is a crucial tool in specifying and justifying developments of systems. This observation pervades the many different notations for developing sequential software and it also crops up in discussions of concurrent systems although there its use is perhaps less uniform. Recent work on rely/guarantee thinking, separation logic and linearisability suggests that a more systematic use of abstraction pays real dividends. Furthermore, it points to new ways of combining and understanding what are often considered to be different -even competing- approaches.
Short CV
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 is also currently applying research on formal methods to wider issues of dependability. Running up to 2007 his major research involvement was the five university IRC on "Dependability of Computer-Based Systems" of which he was overall Project Director - this was followed by a Platform Grant "Trustworthy Ambient Systems" (TrAmS) (Cliff was PI - funding from EPSRC) and is now CI on TrAmS-2. He also coordinates the three work packages on methodology in the DEPLOY project (on which he is CI) and is PI on an EPSRC-funded AI4FM project.
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 (and enjoyed the family atmosphere of Wolfson College). From Oxford, he moved directly to a chair at Manchester University where he built a world-class Formal Methods group which -among other projects was the academic lead in the largest Software Engineering project funded by the Alvey programme (IPSE 2.5 created the "mural"(Formal Method) Support Systems theorem proving assistant).
During his time at Manchester, Cliff had a 5-year Senior Fellowship from the research council and later spent a sabbatical at Cambridge for the whole of the Newton Institute event on "Semantics" (and there appreciated the hospitality of a Visiting Fellowship at Gonville & Caius College. Much of his research at this time focused on formal (compositional) development methods for concurrent systems.
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.
He has been a member of IFIP Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology) since 1973 (and was Chair from 1987-96).