Join Professor Alastair Donaldson, online or in person, for his Imperial Inaugural.
We have limited in-person spaces available so please ensure you register in advance.
Feel free to join us online
Event link: https://bit.ly/YT-AlastairDonaldson
I have a confession to make. I didn’t really want to be a computer scientist. I wanted to be a rock star. Despite my best efforts, my musical dreams never became a reality. However, I’m extremely fortunate that Computer Science has provided the most fascinating and fulfilling Plan B. It has drawn me into the mind-bending world of programming languages, the mathematically elegant land of formal verification, the chaotic abyss of fuzzing, and the Wild West of GPU computing.
Along the way I have had the privilege of meeting and working with an amazing array of researchers, teaching cohort after cohort of talented undergraduates, and mentoring and collaborating with a wonderful group of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. During this Inaugural Lecture I will talk about some of the highlights of my academic journey, giving insights into technical problems that have particularly excited me, introducing you to some the key colleagues and collaborators who have inspired and guided me, and trying to convince you that, after all, being an academic computer scientist maybe isn’t so different from being a rock star.
Biography
Alastair Donaldson is a Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London where he leads the Multicore Programming Group, investigating novel techniques and tool support for programming, testing and reasoning about highly parallel systems and their programming languages.
He was Founder and Director of GraphicsFuzz Ltd., a start-up company specialising in metamorphic testing of graphics drivers, which was acquired by Google in 2018, after which he spent time working with Google as a software engineer and then as a Visiting Researcher. He was the recipient of the 2017 BCS Roger Needham Award and an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship, and has published more than 100 articles in the fields of programming languages, formal verification, software testing and parallel programming.
Alastair was previously a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, an EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Research Engineer at Codeplay Software Ltd. He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow, and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society.
