Christopher Brown

Lecturer in Computer Science

Dr Christopher Brown
Room 1.06
Jack Cole building
School of Computer Science
University of St Andrews
Fife
KY16 9SX

Tel: +44 (0) 1334 461624
Email: cmb21 \at st-andrews.ac.uk

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Research

PhD Students

Teaching

Admin

News

• 15/06/2021: Our Paper, Proof-Carrying Refactorings: Sound Refactoring for Haskell via Dependent Types has been accepted to WPTE 21! With Adam Barwell and Susmit Sarkar.
• 11/06/2021: Our Paper, Restoration of Legacy Parallelism: Transforming Pthreads into Farm and Pipeline Patterns, is now published in the International Journal of Parallel Programming! DOI: 10.1007/s10766-021-00716-z. This is joint with Vladimir Janjic and Adam Barwell (at Imperial).
• May 2021: I gave a talk summarising some of the work from the EU Teamplay project on the Contract Specification Language system for reasoning about non-functional properties using dependent types at the Teamplay Workshop (https://event.sdu.dk/teamplay-workshop). Slides available here.
• May 2021: I gave a talk at the Teamplay workshop (https://event.sdu.dk/teamplay-workshop) about using refactoring and dependent types to make C programs more secure, via a technique using semi-interleaved ladders. Slides available here.
• 27/04/21: Our paper Restoration of Legacy Parallelism: Transforming Pthreads into Farm and Pipeline Patterns has been accepted into the International Journal of Parallel programming! Watch this space!
• We will hold a 2 day event in May to disseminate our work on the ongoing EU Teamplay project. Registration and tentative programme: https://event.sdu.dk/teamplay-workshop

• Parallel Programming
  • Parallel programming, tools, languages, compilers, run-time systems, libraries, algorithms, schedulers, GPUs, energy-aware parallelism...
  • Semantics and verification of parallel programs
  • Parallel pattern (and skeleton) libraries
  • Parallelism safety
  • Removal of legacy concurrency
• Refactoring
  • Transforming sequential programs into parallel versions
  • Proving correctness and general soundness of refactoring and program transformation, using verification techniques such as dependent types
  • Building refactoring tools to help developers write parallel programs
  • Optimising programs for energy efficiency, using compiler and refactoring techniques
• Programming Languages
  • Compilers, static semantics, code generation, instruction selection
  • Non-functional properties such as energy-efficiency
  • Semantics of programming languages
  • Correctness, verification and general soundness of compilers

Current projects and activities:

• Energise: Refactorings and Skeletons for Energy-Aware Applications on High-Performance Embedded Systems (EPSRC)
  EPSRC project. April 2021 - March 2024.
  The Energise project aims to develop new, formally-motivated, refactorings and transformations that reduce energy consumption for embedded multi-core devices. This includes implementing refactorings for target languages such as C; proving general soundness of the refactorings using e.g. dependent types; developing new programming abstractions (skeletons) for abstracting common energy-reducing programming patterns; running experiments; writing proofs of correctness, etc.
• TeamPlay: TeamPlay - Time, Energy and security Analysis for Multi/Many-core heterogenous PLAtforms (EU - Horizon 2020)
  EU Horizon 2020 project. January 2018 - June 2021.
  The TeamPlay project aims to develop new, formally-motivated, techniques that will allow execution time, energy usage, security, and other important non-functional properties of parallel software to be treated effectively, and as first- class citizens. We will build this into a toolbox for developing highly parallel software for low-energy systems, as required by the internet of things, cyber-physical systems etc.

• Skel: Skel is a parallel programming library for Erlang that implements common parallel patterns and skeletons.
• ParaFormance: A refactoring tool suite for developing parallel applications in C and C++.
• CSL: Contract Specification Language is a library implented in Idris to allow developers to reason about non-functional properties of their C and C++ applications.

Postgraduate Research and Students

• Amaal Alhejaily on refactoring for reducing energy consumption.
• Yasir Alguwaifi on researching into meta-heuristic and MOO techniques for energy profiling in multi-cores.

I am very keen to find research students who will work me on any of these topics:

• refactoring multi-core
• refactoring for energy-aware systems
• energy-aware patterns and skeletons
• non-functional properties of time, energy and security
• program transformation
• formal reasoning of refactoring systems and/or parallel programming
• dependent types and refactoring
• formal semantics of programming languages
• parallel programming

Undergraduate Modules:

• CS4201: Programming Language Design and Implementation (Autumn 2019- )
• CS4204: Concurrency and Multi-Core Architectures (Spring 2019- )

Admin

• I am Second Level Coordinator for Computer Science. Email: second-coord-cs at st-andrews.ac.uk