Mark Lawford

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.

Tools:

The Matlab/Simulink Tabular Expression Toolbox was originally developed by my former Software Engineering M.A.Sc. student Colin Eles. More information on the tool is available here

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.

I am a member of the McMaster Centre for Software Certification (McSCert).

Conferences etc.

• ISoLA 2010, Program Committee, 4th International Symposium On Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation, 18-20 October 2010, Amirandes, Heraclion, Crete.
• FGPAs in NPP, Co-Chair, 3rd Workshop on the Application of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in Nuclear Power Plants, Sept. 28-Oct. 1, 20010, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
• APRES 2009 Program Committee Member, 2nd Workshop on Adaptive and Reconfigurable Embedded Systems, Oct 11, 2009, Grenoble, France.
• CCECE 2009 Technical Program Committee Chair for Symposium on Computers, Software and Applications, IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering, May 3-6, 2009.
• ICFEM 2008 Program Committee Member, 10th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, Oct. 27 - 31, Kitakyushu-city, Japan.
• FMICS 2008 Program Committee Member, 13th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems, September 15-16, 2008, L'Aquila, Italy
• AFM 2006 Program Committee Member, Automated Formal Methods Workshop - 21 August 2006, Seattle, USA.
• ICFEM 2005 Program Committee Member, 7th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods -1-4 November 2005, Manchester, UK.
• ICFEM 2004Program Committee Member, 6th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods - Microsoft Research, Seattle, WA, Nov. 2004
• ACSD 2004 Local Organizing Committee - Sponsorships Director of Applications of Concurrency to Systems Design - Software Quality Research Lab, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada June 2004.
• Joint Special Issues of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and IEEE Software Magazine on "Inspection in Software Engineering" - Guest Co-Editor with David L. Parnas - Selected papers from the First Workshop on Inspection in Software Engineering(WISE'01) were published focusing on the theory in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (Vol. 29, No. 8, August 2003) and the practice in IEEE Software Magazine (Vol. 20, No. 4, July/August 2003).
• WISE'01 - Co-Chair - The First Workshop on Inspection in Software Engineering (WISE'01) was held in June 2001 as one of 4 official satellite workshops of CAV'01.

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

Current Graduate Course:

CAS 725 Formal Methods for Real-Time Systems - information, lecture slides and assignment hand outs, etc. will be made available on Avenue.

Classes will be Tuesday and Friday 14:00-15:30 in ITB/222 starting on Sept. 13, 2011.

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 Postdocs and Graduate Students

Recent Graduate Students

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