Stuart Anderson is interested in how we are justified in placing confidence in programmable systems. This interest arose in the context of his projects involving reasoning about critical-systems. These projects have an interdisciplinary approach taking a broad view of what constitutes evidence of safety.
This approach has evolved into an holistic investigation of the dependability of programmable systems. This takes the interactions between systems, people and organisations as its focus concentrating on how failures arise in these communications and how we represent and reason about such systems. A central plank in the investigation of error is the use of domain-specific representations and how they support human and machine reasoning.
He is interested in transferring his work into industry and has coordinated a Teaching Company Scheme with Adelard, a safety critical consultancy, to transfer a range of techniques developed at Edinburgh into industrial use. Currently he is involved in a project investigating adapting formal reasoning to the domain of full authority digital engine controllers. More broadly, his involvement with the European Workshop on Industrial Computer System (EWICS TC7) and several European companies provides strong industrial interaction.
Corin Gurr is interested in issues of communication of complex information amongst multi-disciplinary teams; in particular in the design and analysis of highly dependable programmable systems. This work has been carried out in close collaboration with a number of industrial partners and human communication specialists, with the aim of applying formal techniques to mediate the problems of reasoning and communication between the diverse technical groups involved in the design and development of large-scale, critical systems with a software component.
His recent and current research has combined empirical studies of industry best practice, together with formal and cognitively-based analyses of communication issues in large-scale system development and assessment. A central theme has been the study of visual notations, such as those used in the design of digital engine controllers and other such embedded programmable systems. This work has combined:Konstantinos Tourlas has just finished studying towards the degree of Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh, Division of Informatics. His thesis work focused on the application of mathematical techniques to the analysis and design of diagrammatic representations for domain-specific languages.