I am a Professor of Computer Systems and Programming Languages at the School of Computing Science, in the University of Glasgow. My main research themes are Compilers, Language Runtimes, and Cybersecurity. I lead the Systems Research section at Glasgow. You can find out more about my research, or browse through my publications list. I am a Senior Member of the ACM and a Fellow of the BCS.

Research Projects

• M4Secure: Making Memory Management More Secure, 2023-2026, funded by EPSRC.
• Capabilities for Coders, 2022-2023, funded by EPSRC. See [project website].
• Capable VMs, 2020-2024, funded by EPSRC. See [project website].
• ... and several previous EPSRC-funded grants.

People I work with

I supervise the following PhD students at Glasgow:

• Niall Barr
    Tools to support Domain Specific Language development and Product Family Engineering
• Yuxin Qin
    Performance Optimization for WebAssembly Interpreters
• Charles Varley
    Programming Language Abstractions for Named Data Networking
• Kai Feng
    Early detection of zero-day exploits in Industrial Control Systems
• Jacob Trevor
    Quantum Memory Management
• Duncan Lowther
    Future Secure Memory Systems

Completed PhDs:

• Khaled Alnowaiser
    Garbage collection optimization for non uniform memory access architectures [Thesis]
• Dhahi Alshammari
    Evaluation of cloud computing modelling tools: simulators and predictive models [Thesis]
• Dejice Jacob
    Opportunistic acceleration of array-centric Python computation in heterogeneous environments [Thesis]
• Adrian Ramsingh
    Improving interoperability in distributed multi-tier software stacks [Thesis]
• Yousef Alhaizaey
    Task Scheduling for Heterogeneous Edge Micro Clusters [Thesis]
• Ohud Alasmari
    Development and validation of an instrument for evaluating online coding tutorial systems [Thesis]

I am always looking for talented Computer Scientists who want to study for a systems research PhD at Glasgow. Please contact me if you intend to apply.

Service

I am a peer review college member for EPSRC and a Carnegie Research Assessor. From 2016-18, I was the Graduate Academy director for SICSA, with responsibility for enhancing PhD experience for Scottish Computing Science students. I am external examiner for undergraduate programmes in Computer Science at Queen's University Belfast Until 2024, I was on the editorial board of the Computer Journal.

I was program chair for Onward! Essays 2022 and workshops co-chair for EuroPar 22 in Glasgow. In 2021, I organized the Scottish Programming Languages and Verification PhD Summer School. I also served as Program Chair for the ACM SIGPLAN Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes conference (MPLR 21). I was on the steering committee for ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM).

Useful Links

• Check out my textbook on Operating Systems Foundations with Linux on the Raspberry Pi
• I contributed to the first ever textbook on SSA: SSA-Based Compiler Design
• I co-developed a Functional Programming in Haskell MOOC
• I co-developed a Teaching Data Science MOOC
• I co-developed a Computational Thinking in JavaScript specialization for Coursera
• Raspberry Pi Cloud project
• Recycle your Raspberry Pi
• My Software Engineering mini-lectures on ITunesU
•  http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9462-6802