Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream. Proof assistants...
I’d like to introduce an exciting new research paper I worked on! It’s about a system called Pudding, and it was presented by Ceren at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, one of the top academic conferences on computer security, in May. Daniel and Alastair also worked on this...
A lot has happened in the last year, so I thought it would be good to write up a review. My biggest change in 2023 was that my wife and I had a baby! This has brought a mixture of joys and frustrations, but overall it has been very good....
This post also appears on Larry Paulson’s blog. We use distributed systems every day in the form of internet services. These systems are very useful, but also challenging to implement because networks are unpredictable. Whenever you send a message over the network, it is likely to arrive quite quickly, but...
I give a five-star ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating to the following book: Jason Parisi and Justin Ball. The Future of Fusion Energy. World Scientific, 2019. ISBN 978-1-78634-749-7. Available from Amazon US, Amazon UK, and many other retailers. I came to this book looking for answers to questions such as: Is there still...
I regularly get asked to give interviews on the topics that I work on, especially for podcasts. To make them easier to find for anybody who’s interested, I thought I would make a list. They touch on a range of different topics, although there is also some overlap so I...
The trigger for this post is the reinstating of Richard Stallman, a very problematic character, to the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). I am appalled by this move, and join others in the call for his removal. This occasion has caused me to reevaluate the position of the...
For the last five or six years, since I bid goodbye to the startup scene and Silicon Valley, I have been increasingly working in public. I have written a book, given around 100 talks (many of which are available on YouTube), published over 20 research papers (all freely available from...
Who is doing interesting work on decentralised content moderation? With Donald Trump suspended from Twitter and Facebook, and Parler kicked off AWS, there is renewed discussion about what sort of speech is acceptable online, and how it should be enforced. Let me say up front that I believe that these...
This blog post uses MathJax to render mathematics. You need JavaScript enabled for MathJax to work. In some recent research, Heidi and I needed to solve the following problem. Say you want to sync a hash graph, such as a Git repository, between two nodes. In Git, each commit is...