Posted: 21st April 2017

The award (sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge) has been made in recognition of outstanding work in the area of many-core programming. Alastair (now at the Department of Computing at Imperial College London), has made a distinguished contribution through his design and application of rigorous program analysis methods to the emerging field of many-core programming. His techniques and case studies have also made a major contribution to fundamental Computer Science research.

He says of receiving the award: ‘I'm incredibly honoured to be receiving the 2017 Roger Needham Award. It's really exciting to have my work recognised via the award, and more generally the award emphasises the importance and potential of research in programming languages and analysis and verification. My work over the years has been in conjunction with many collaborators, in the UK and internationally, and I'm grateful to all of them for their contributions to the exciting problems we've solved together. The Department of Computing at Imperial has provided a wonderful environment for my research group, and I owe a huge amount to the education I received during my undergraduate studies and PhD at the University of Glasgow, the practical skills I learned while a developer at Codeplay, and my postdoctoral experience in the verification group at the University of Oxford.’

The Roger Needham Award is sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge and established in memory of Microsoft's first director of research outside the US. It is awarded for a distinguished research contribution in computer science by a UK based researcher within ten years of their PhD.