User:Daniel N. Jackson

Biography
Daniel Jackson grew up in central London. A graduate of Oxford University, majoring in maths, he then went on to work for various companies, and move to Amercia. He currently lives in Boston with his children and wife.

Intrests
"My area is software engineering; I have broad interests in software design, specification and analysis, with a focus on critical systems. Over the last five years, I've devoted most of my research effort to the development of Alloy, a language for modelling software that is supported by a fully automatic analyzer based on SAT. I am also working, with my students, on a variety of static analyses for extracting design representations from code; on automatic test case generation; on checking conformance of code to designs; and on the role of module dependences in software design.

In my research group, we've always developed our ideas in the context of realistic examples. Two major case studies have been air-traffic control and, more recently, proton therapy.

Recent professional activities include keynotes at RE 2005, CADE, ZB 2003, FME, SAS, and ASE, and summer school lectures at Lipari (2005) Marktoberdorf (2003). I am chairing a National Academies study on software dependability and certification.

My work has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, and by the High Dependability Computing Project of NASA/CMU."

He is also interested in digital and analog photography. To see his photos click the link below.

http://dnjphoto.org/

Alloy
The Alloy Analyzer is a tool developed by the Software Design Group for analyzing models written in Alloy, a simple structural modeling language based on first-order logic. The tool can generate instances of invariants, simulate the execution of operations (even those defined implicitly), and check user-specified properties of a model. Alloy and its analyzer have been used primarily to explore abstract software designs. Its use in analyzing code for conformance to a specification and as an automatic test case generator are being investigated in ongoing research projects