Computer Science News

Tom Ridge has secured funding from the EPSRC (under the First Grant scheme) for a project entitled "Future Filesystems" - congratulations Tom!

Abstract:

Modern filesystems are designed to satisfy many complicated requirements. As a result, implementations are beset with problems. The implementation code is extremely complex, and almost inevitably contains bugs. These bugs can and do lead to data corruption and loss. Development time is very lengthy. Testing is also very lengthy and costly, and does not guarantee to eliminate all bugs. It is often unclear to application developers what guarantees a filesystem provides, so that it becomes extremely difficult to write correct applications for a given filesystem, let alone applications that are portable across different filesystems. In this project, we aim to tackle these problems by applying formal methods techniques. The project involves theoretical aspects but is focused on applications of theory to real-world systems.

The department has a started a Twitter account. This will report all of the news items announced on this webpage, but will also carry other announcements about research, courses, and student events.

The department is advertising a studentship entitled "Future Filesystems". The post (funded by Microsoft) will be under the supervision of Tom Ridge. Please see this link for further details.