FATA video

FATA video

An overview of the FATA Research Section from the section head Professor David Manlove. Videos for each of the three research groups can be found further down this page. 

Overview

The Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms section (FATA) is a large and very active research group in theoretical computer science, currently leading or contributing to research grants funded by a range of organisations, including EPSRC, Responsible AI UK, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Leverhulme Trust. We currently host three research fellowships.

Our research develops and applies mathematics and logic to the design and analysis of algorithms and complex computational systems. We are especially interested in bringing the clarity and insight of formal theories to hard application problems of real practical significance.

Our theoretical research is internationally leading as evidenced by recent publications in high-quality journals and conference proceedings.  Much of this work is driven by practical applications, such as verifying autonomous vehicles, analysing the spread of disease in livestock and matching kidney donors to patients. 

Many of our projects are collaborative, as the section aims to apply formal ideas to problems of genuine interest outside the formal community itself.  Collaboration involves, for example, life scientists and communication system designers, companies in the telecommunications, software and pharmaceutical sectors, as well as government organisations.

Within FATA, there are three main research areas/groups with focus on specific research topics:

  • Algorithms and Complexity: graph algorithms, counting and enumeration algorithms, parameterised algorithms, algorithmic game theory, algorithms for matching problems, constraint programming and algorithm engineering.
  • Formal Methods: modelling and analysis of complex and reactive systems, probabilistic model checking, process algebras, bigraphs, graph algorithms, game theory, computational biology, telecommunications software and protocol analysis.
  • Programming Language Foundations: programming language semantics and type systems, session types for concurrent and distributed systems, process algebras, quantum computation.

The FATA section is led by Professor David Manlove.

Section members

Group of researchers

Group photo, November 2022

Top row, left to right: Jose Rodríguez Bacallado, Gethin Nroman, Douglas Fraser, Ivaylo Valkov, Surasak Phetmanee

Second row from the top, left to right: Lewis Dyer, Fabrizio Augusto Mendoza Granada, William Pettersson, Christopher Chandler, Duncan Paul Attard, Simon Fowler

Second row from the bottom, left to right: Sofiat Olaosebikan, Carlijn Bogaardt, Shruthi Prusty, David Manlove, Peace Ayegba, Vikraman Choudhury, Ciaran McCreesh

Bottom row, left to right: Jayakrishnan Madathil, Alice Miller, Jess Enright, Oana Andrei, Matthew McIlree, Laura Larios-Jones

Missing from the group photo as of Nov 2022: Muffy Calder, Simon Gay, Ornela Dardha, Kitty Meeks, Michele Sevegnani, Blair Archibald, John Sylvester, Mengwei Xu, Yue Gue, Jan De Muijnck-Hughes, Kyle Burns, Samuel Hand, Ethan Kelly, Magdalena Latifa

Academic Staff with academic role and affiliations to research groups/themes:

Honorary Research Fellow/Lecturer:

Research Staff:

Research Students:

Highlights

Some highlights of our work include:

Recent News

June 2024 Alice Miller has been awarded a research fellowship funded by the Leverhume Trust, with the project titled "Combinatorial solutions for maximum allocations".

April 2024 Gethin Norman has been awarded the 2024 ETAPS Test-of-Time Tool Award with his long-term collaborators Marta Kwiatkowska and Dave Parker from the University of Oxford for their probabilistic model checking tool PRISM. (Award ceremony photo)

March 2024 Yiannis Giannakopoulos has been appointed as Turing Fellow by the Alan Turing Institute.

August 2023 Matthew McIlree and Ciaran McCreesh received the best paper award at CP 2023 for their paper "Proof Logging for Smart Extensional Constraints".

August 2023 Ciaran McCreesh was awarded the Association for Constraint Programming (ACP) Early Career Researcher Award at the CP 2023 conference. (Award ceremony photo)

June 2023 Prof Alice Miller has been awarded an EPSRC grant M4Secure: Making Memory Management More Secure with Dr Jeremy Singer as PI.

June 2023 We are welcoming Dr Yiannis Giannakopoulos who joins the School of Computing Science as Senior Lecturer on 1 June 2023!

March 2023 Ciaran McCreesh (as local chair) and other members of FATA are organising the 39th British Colloquium for Theoretical Computer Science (BCTCS'23) on 3-4 April 2023 in Glasgow - an annual event for UK-based researchers in theoretical computer science.

March 2023 Dr Ornela Dardha has been awarded the inaugural ‘Science, She Says!’ award by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI). The award recognises an outstanding young female scientist, not of Italian descent, who has remarkably contributed to the advancement of science and technology and has strong connections with the Italian scientific community. The award is given to candidates from five regions across the world, with Dr Dardha winning the Europe award.

Jan 2023 Two positions are available on the KidneyAlgo project in the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, for a postdoc position and a Research Software Engineer position. Closing date for applications is 31 January 2023.

December 2022 Dr Sofiat Olaosebikan started her permanent positionas Lecturer in Algorithms and Complexity.

November 2022 Prof David Manlove has been awarded an EPSRC grant KidneyAlgo: New Algorithms for UK and International Kidney Exchange in collaboration with Prof D. Paulusma from University of Durham.

August 2022 The School of Computing Science is seeking to appoint a Lecturer / Senior Lecturer / Reader in Algorithms and Complexity. Contact Professor David Manlove for informal enquiries. More details are available at this page, with closing date 30 September 2022.

July 2022 Ornela Dardha and Michele Sevegnani have been promoted to Senior Lecturer positions (equivalent to Associate Professors) starting 1 August 2022.

19 July 2022 Michele Sevegnani and Blair Archibald received an Amazon Research Award (Fall 2021) for their project “From Whiteboards to Models: Diagrammatic Formal Modelling for Everyone”.

19 July 2022 Ornela Dardha together with her co-authors Elena Giachino and Davide Sangiorgi received this year PPDP 10 Year Most Influential Paper Award for their paper Session types revisited.

1 June 2022 Dr Blair Archibald is now a Lecturer affiliated with both GLASS and FATA research sections, as well as with the Programming Languages research theme.

12 May 2022 FATA research on Algorithms for Paired Kidney Donation has led to world-leading impact according to REF 2021. This work, led by David Manlove, has been possible thanks to many collaborators over the years, notably Péter Biró, Gregg O’Malley, William Pettersson, and James Trimble.

1 May 2022 Dr Simon Fowler is now a Lecturer with the FATA research section.

12 August 2021 Dr Ciaran McCreesh was awarded the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship for five years starting on 1 October 2021. The title of his project is "Trustworthy constraint programming and optimisation".

Projects

Current (or shortly about to start):

Over the past 10 years:

Research-led teaching

We are offering courses in advanced elements of algorithmics, model checking, programming languages, theory of computation. We are always looking for enthusiastic young people who are interested in Level 4 or MSci projects or PhD theses. More details on PhD projects and funded opportunities can be found here and a list of examples of PhD topics here.

Courses:

Seminar series

FATA seminars are usually held on Tuesdays from 3pm to 4pm; see the Events tab for more details. If you would like to give a talk, please contact the FATA seminar convenor Jayakrishnan Madathil.

Events this week

There are currently no events scheduled this week


Upcoming events

[FATA Seminar] Bigraphs as a theoretical base for verifying interactive systems

Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: Cyril ALLIGNOL and Celia PICARD, Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile
Date: 10 December, 2024
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: Sir Alwyn Williams Building, 422 Seminar Room

Abstract: Interactive systems are multiplying, including in critical aeronautical systems such as aircraft cockpits and air traffic control systems. At the same time, UIDLs, the languages that enable the development of such systems, are also on the rise. However, to date, these languages offer no guarantees, neither in terms of compilation nor on the systems developed. Hence the need for a verified programming framework for UIDLs. This is the main subject of our research.

In this talk, we will present the results we have obtained so far and our ongoing work, namely: using bigraphs to express the semantics of UIDLs; defining a formal minimal UIDL based on bigraphs; formalising the bigraph theory in the Coq proof assistant. We will also discuss our future work around the verification of interactive systems, including the verification of interactive properties.

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This event is part of the FATA Weekly Seminar, which takes place every Tuesday from 3:00 - 4:00 PM in Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and on Zoom https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/83611964233?pwd=CgRyzxK8Z9fP2ULTb5ONWZeUYx2t2E.1

[FATA Seminar] Formally verified hardening of C programs against fault injection

Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: Basile PESIN, Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile
Date: 10 December, 2024
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: Sir Alwyn Williams Building, 422 Seminar Room

Abstract: Fault attacks allow malicious actors to modify the behavior of a program by
physically injecting a fault in the hardware. They typically target sensitive
applications such as cryptography services, authentication or boot-loader and
firmware updater. They can be defended against by adding countermeasures, that
is control flow checks and redundancies, either in the hardware, or in the
software running on it. In particular, software countermeasures may be added
automatically during compilation.

In this talk, we will describe a formally verified implementation of this
approach in the CompCert verified compiler for the C language. We proposed a
toolkit to implement countermeasures as transformations of a middle-end
representation of CompCert, RTL.  We applied this toolkit to two existing
countermeasures that protect the control flow of the program.  We proved that
these countermeasures are correct, that is, they do not change the observable
behavior of the program during an execution without fault injection. We then
modeled the effect of a fault on the behavior of the program as an extension of
the semantic model of RTL. We used this new model to formally prove the efficacy
of the countermeasure: all attacks are caught. In addition to this formal
reasoning, we evaluated the protected program using Lazart, a tool for symbolic
fault injection.

 

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This event is part of the FATA Weekly Seminar, which takes place every Tuesday from 3:00 - 4:00 PM in Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and on Zoom https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/83611964233?pwd=CgRyzxK8Z9fP2ULTb5ONWZeUYx2t2E.1


Past events

Research Groups in FATA

Algorithms and Complexity

Find out about our research into the design and analysis of algorithms and into computational complexity, including projects and algorithmic applications.

An overview video of the research activities carried out by the members of this group can be found at this youtube link.

Formal Methods

Find out about our research on topics including process calculi, semantic models and logics, verification techniques based on types and type systems, formulation of model checking algorithms, techniques for efficient and scalable analysis including abstraction and symmetry reduction, and developing game theoretic techniques.

An overview video of the research activities carried out by the members of this group can be found at this youtube link.

Programming Languages

Find out about our research on topics concerning the foundations, design, implementation and practice of programming languages.

An overview video of the research activities carried out by the members of this group can be found at this youtube link.