Welcome to Robert Clark's Home Page.

Teaching

Last teaching:

• Spring 2009
  • CSC9T4 Managing Information
  • CSC9Y4 Programming Language Paradigms
  • ITNP92 Object Oriented Software Design
• Autumn 2009
  • CSC933 Objects and Information Systems
  • CSC9P5 Software Engineering I

Research Interests

My research is into the practical application of formal methods to support reliable object-oriented development. In ROOA executable specifications are created enabling rapid prototyping to be used to give feedback to requirements capture, analysis and design. Omnibus is a new project with Thomas Wilson and Savi Maharaj which aims to support the development of reliable object-oriented software. It is built around the new Omnibus language and IDE which is being developed by Thomas Wilson and which is designed to be both amenable to formal analysis and familiar to Java programmers.

In the Descartes Project (Esprit 937), I developed the CSP/me too method which was used to formalise the early stages of the object-oriented development of embedded systems. The target language was Ada.

This work progressed while I was associated with the Lotosphere Esprit Project with LOTOS replacing CSP/me too as the formal description technique.

Work with Dr. Ana Moreira, who is now at the New University of Lisbon, led to the creation of the Rigorous Object-Oriented Analysis Method (ROOA), in which LOTOS is used to formalise the analysis phase of object-oriented development. ROOA was then extended to the creation of an intermediate model in which requirements are modelled in terms of the expectations of the environment.

Other research interests are the effect of inheritance on the type safety of systems, the importance of behavioural inheritance in software development and on the semantics and the addition of formality to UML.

I have written two books; one on Ada and one on Comparative Programming Languages. The first two editions of Comparative Programming Languages were written jointly with Prof Les Wilson while the changes in the new third edition were done solely by me. A web site supporting the third edition is under construction.

Professional Bodies

Member of the British Computer Society (MBCS and CITP), a Chartered Engineer (CEng), a Chartered Scientist (CSci) and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

External

Member of the Academic Accreditation Committee (AAC) of the BCS.

I have been an external examiner for undergraduate Honours degrees at Paisley, Robert Gordons, Keele and Birmingham Universities and am currently external examiner at Cardiff University.

Other Information

I served two three-year terms as Head of Department from 2002 - 08. From December 2009, I have been an Honorary Senior Lecturer.

The following additional information is available:

• My picture.
• Publications since 1990.
• Computing Science Home Page.

I maintain the website of the New Zealand Society of Great Britain.

I was President (2007-8) and maintain the website of the Stirling and District Philatelic Society. and a site "New Zealand Stamp Images" dealing with scanned images of New Zealand stamps and New Zealand postal and airmail history including Chalon Heads and experimental air mails.

---