Nathan Chong and Petr Hosek from the Department of Computing have been selected as a finalist at the UK ICT Pioneers - EPSRC partnership.

Nathan Chong from the Multicore Programming Group here in the Department of Computing has been selected as a finalist for the category of "Technology Everywhere". This competition, organised by EPSRC and key industry partners in ICT-related topics is designed to recognise exceptional UK PhD students who are able to communicate and demonstrate the excellence and exploitation potential of their research. Open to all UK PhD students the competition this year has involved an essay and video to reach the final. Finalists have the opportunity to present their research at a high-profile event to a panel of academic and industry experts to win cash prizes.

Nathan's research aims to help programmers write better programs using static verification. Nathan is a key researcher and contributor to GPUVerify a static verification tool for GPU (graphics processing unit) programs.

For further information you can read Nathan's entry essay and watch his 2nd round video. Nathan is supervised by Dr. Alastair F. Donaldson and Professor Paul H.J.Kelly.

Petr Hosek from the Software Reliability Group here in the Department of Computing has been selected as a finalist for his work on developing a novel multi-version technique for surviving buggy software updates.

Software systems are constantly evolving, with new versions and patches. Unfortunately, software updates are not always reliable and can present a risk of introducing new bugs and security vulnerabilities.The key insight into reducing this  risk is to run the new software version in parallel with the old one. Whenever a new update becomes available, instead of upgrading the software to the new version,  the new version is run in parallel with the old one and by carefully coordinating their executions and selecting the more reliable behavior they diverge into a more secure and dependable multi-version application.

Petr‘s research interests include software engineering, security and reliability, with a focus on exploring ways to improve the software update process. He has an MSc and a BSc in Computer Science from Charles University in Prague, where he specialised in software engineering and dependable systems. Petr worked for five years as a software engineer in a small Prague-based software company, where he designed several custom information systems for major clients in the oil industry. Petr is a recipient of the Google European Fellowship in Software Engineering.

For further information about  Petr's entry  and to watch his video please see.

http://srg.doc.ic.ac.uk/projects/mx/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmFr-ZpvGv8

Petr is supervised by  Dr Cristian Cadar.