Cliff B Jones

Cliff Jones is Professor of Computing Science at Newcastle University. As well as his academic career, Cliff has spent over twenty years in industry. His fifteen years in IBM saw, among other things, the creation -with colleagues in the renowned 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. 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". 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.

Much of his research at this time focused on formal (compositional) development methods for concurrent systems. His major avenues of current research are listed below.

Cliff is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), ACM, BCS, and IET.

(A brief bio is available - e.g. for talk announcements.)

Teaching

These web pages are about my research which I view as international. I see teaching as an internal topic (I don't for example put my course material out on the Internet); this certainly doesn't mean that I undervalue teaching - I love communicating. My main teaching at the moment is on semantics of programming languages .

Current research interests

Concurrency - including rely/guarantee conditions and links to separation logic(s)
(Formal method) support systems (especially the AI4FM project)
Logics for Partial Functions
Broad issues of dependability (rather than just "formal methods") now occupy some of my research.
- An update on the "Hayes/Jackson/Jones" idea has been published in a Festschrift for Michael Jackson - it is also visible as a Technical Report
- The DEPLOY project (which is deploying the methods and tools from the RODIN project)
- See the interdisciplinary DIRC project on "Dependability of Computer-Based Systems"
- An even wider study of dependability links me as CI in the ITRC project
History - I think it important to capture some of the knowledge about the growth of formal methods
- Some papers
- Semantics library
VDM is no longer active research but some useful sources are available
The TrAmS-2 Platform Grant (which follows on from the TrAmS Platform Grant) provides wonderful underpinning for our research.

List of main publications

as a PDF (with some explanation)
and (thanks to BibTeX2HTML) as html (with urls of many papers/books, albeit with different numbering from the above PDF)
Recent books:
Festschrift for Brian Randell
Festschrift for Tony Hoare
Proceedings of Methods, Models and Tools for Fault Tolerance
Proceedings of ICTAC 2007
DIRC Stucture book
Festschrift for Dines Bjorner and Zhou Chaochen
Proceedings of REFT06
CSP@25

Qualifications etc.

Fellow of ACM elected 1995
FREng elected 2003
DPhil (Oxford) 1981
Fellow of IET (was IEE)
Fellow of BCS
CEng

Editorial (current)

Founding Editor of Formal Aspects of Computing and editor-in-chief from 1989-2009 (Jim Woodcock is now editor-in-chief)
A foundation editor of Journal of Universal Computer Science
Advisor to the Journal of Logic and Computation

Career Sketch

Newcastle University ((since) August 1999) - Professor of Computing Science

Project Director (July 2000 - 2007) of the five university Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration on Dependability of Computer-Based Systems

Harlequin (1996-June 1999) - Technical Director
The University of Manchester (1981-96) - Professor of Computing Science
IBM (1965-1979) - worked in Hursley (UK), Vienna and Brussels
before that (LEO, Esso, Ford)
Brief biography

Contacting me

e-mail: cliffjones@acm.org
Telephone (at Newcastle University) +44-191-222-8183

Last updated: 2012-02-05