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Biography
I'm an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham (UK). I was awarded a PhD in Computer Science from the University of York (UK).
My research interests lie in the intersection of formal software verification and safety-critical software, with a particular focus on applying formal methods to autonomous robotic systems. The formal verification side of my interests include behavioural specification (often in CSP), model-checking, requirements engineering, and runtime verification. I'm interested in applying these sorts of techniques to autonomous, automated, and other safety-critical systems. In particular, I have had experience with rule-based autonomy, such as the Belief-Desire-Intention model of autonomy. I've also become interested in providing guidance for how to develop autonomous systems that are amenable to robust verification. In 2019 I co-founded the Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS) which showcases the advances in formal methods for tackling the unique challenges that autonomous systems pose for verification.
Previously I was a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Maynooth University (Ireland), on the EU-funded Verification and Validation of Automated Systems' Safety and Security (VALU3S) project. While at Maynooth, my research focussed on using the Formal Requirements Elicitation Tool (FRET) to formalise the requirements specification of an Aircraft Engine Software Controller. During this job, I adapted four software factorings so that they were suitable for requirements in FRET, implementing one in a fork, called Mu-FRET.
Before Maynooth, I was a Research Associate at the University of Liverpool (UK) and then Manchester (UK). In this job I worked on the Robotics and AI in Nuclear hub (RAIN), developing approaches that tackle the modularity and heterogeneity often found in modern autonomous robotic systems.