Mark Lawford

B.Sc. (Eng.) (Queen's), M.A.Sc. (Toronto), Ph.D. (Toronto), P.Eng.

Greetings.

I am currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing And Software. I joined the department in August 1998 as an Assistant Professor. My PhD was completed under the supervision of Prof. W.M. Wonham in the Systems Control group at the University of Toronto in February 1997. From March 1997 to July 1998 I was a contractor at Ontario Hydro performing Formal Verification of the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station Shutdown System Trip Computer Software. For the small part I played in helping to automate the systematic design verification of safety critical software on that project, I was a co-recipient of an Ontario Hydro New Technology award. My research interests fall under the general headings of Software Engineering and Control of Discrete Event Systems (DES), in particular Formal Methods for Real-Time Systems (synthesis, verification, and model reduction), practical application of formal methods in the software engineering process, computer aided inspection, and supervisory control of modular, nondeterministic and probabilistic DES, and hybrid systems.

I am a licensed Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario and a Senior Member of the IEEE.


Academic Activities:

Publications:

A bibliography of selected papers with abstracts , BibTeX entries and full papers downloads of some of my work.

Software Certification Consortium (SCC):

I have been working with my McMaster Software Quality Research Lab (SQRL) colleagues (Alan Wassyng and Tom Maibaum) and many others, to establish a Software Certification Consortium (SCC). One of SCC's first initiatives is to issue a Software Grand Challenge to use formal methods to specify, design and implement a Pacemaker. The starting point is an informal requirements document from Boston Scientific and a PIC Microcontroller based hardware reference platform developed at the University of Minnesota. I am currently in the process of getting Pacemaker boards manufactured. Please contact me if you are interested in purchasing one.

Conferences etc.


Service:

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Discovery Grant Selection Committee 330 - Computing and Information Sciences A 2008-2010 Competitions.


Current Undergraduate Courses:

Term 1: MECHTRON 3TA4 Embedded Systems Design I

Term 2: MECHTRON 3TB4 Embedded Systems Design II - NOTE ELM is the main source for course information. The MECHTRON 3TB4 link is an incomplete temporary local mirror to work around how useless the BlackBoard system is right now at McMaster.


Current Graduate Course:

CAS 725 Formal Methods for Real-Time Systems - information, lecture slides and assignment hand outs, etc.

Previous Undergraduate Courses:

SFWR ENG 4G06 Software Engineering Senior Thesis

SFWR ENG 2F03 Mathematical Logic for Software Engineering - information, lecture slides and assignment handouts etc.

SFWR ENG 3DX3 Dynamic Models And Control Of Physical Systems

SFWR ENG 4A03 Real-Time Systems and Computer Control Systems - information, lecture slides and assignment handouts, etc.

Previous Graduate Course:

CAS 704 Real-Time, Embedded Systems

CS 734 - information, lecture slides and assignment hand outs, etc.


Current Graduate Students

  • Alex Korobkine, Ph.D. in Software Engeineering
  • Vera Pantelic, Ph.D. in Software Engeineering
  • Lucian Patcas, Ph.D. in Software Engeineering (Co-supervised with Tom Maibaum)
  • Honghan Deng, M.A.Sc. in Software Engineering
  • Colin Eles, M.A.Sc. in Software Engineering
  • Asif Iqbal, M.A.Sc. in Software Engineering (Co-supervised with Alan Wassyng)
  • Linna Pang, Ph.D. in Computer Science (Co-supervised with Alan Wassyng)
  • Mitch Shaughnessy, M.Eng. in Mechatronics

  • Calendar

    I have been an avid Linux user/sys admin since 1994. To learn about the Linux operating system, check out the Linux Documentation Project.



    
    I stayed in school this long,
     but still no one can tell me why?
    They figure who would know,
     better than I?
    
    from Autobiography by Sloan off one cord to another
    
    [ CAS | ML | Papers ]