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Formal Analysis and Software Testing meets Programming Languages

Research group in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, formerly known as the Multicore Programming Group

  • We work on fast programming languages for accelerated computing
  • We design formal analysis and software testing techniques
  • We use these techniques to make programming languages more reliable

People

Current research group members

Former research group members

  • Haoyang Ma, Vising Researcher 2024-2025
  • Chengsong Tan, postdoc 2022-2024, jointly advised by John Wickerson
  • Vasileios Klimis, postdoc 2021–2023, jointly advised by John Wickerson Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.
  • Jack Clark, research assistant 2021-2023, jointly advised by John Wickerson
  • Karine Even-Mendoza, postdoc 2020-2022, jointly advised by Cristian Cadar Lecturer at King’s College London
  • Matthew Windsor, postdoc 2018-2021, jointly advised by John Wickerson software engineer at Anaplan
  • Pritam Gharat, postdoc 2018-2021, jointly advised by Cristian Cadar Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research India
  • Michael Marcozzi, postdoc 2018-2020, jointly advised by Cristian Cadar Tenured Researcher at the CEA LIST institute from Université Paris-Saclay
  • Qiyi Tang, postdoc 2018-2019, jointly advised by Cristian Cadar Lecturer at the University of Liverpool
  • David MacIver, PhD student, 2017-2021 independent software developer, writer and consultant
  • Dan Iorga, PhD student (thesis) then posdoc, 2017-2022, co-supervised by John Wickerson Staff Engineer at Qualcomm
  • Hugues Evrard, postdoc 2016-2018 Software Engineer at Google
  • Tyler Sorensen, PhD student (thesis) 2015-2018 Assistant Professor at University of California Santa Cruz
  • Ethel Morgan, PhD student 2015-2017
  • Andrei Lascu, research assistant then PhD student (thesis) 2014-2021 Postdoc at King’s College London
  • Christopher Lidbury, PhD student (thesis) 2014-2019 Software Engineer in industry
  • Victor Magron, postdoc 2014-2015, jointly advised by George Constantinides Researcher at CNRS, Tolouse
  • Pantazis Deligiannis, PhD student (thesis) 2013-2016 Principal Research Software Engineer at Microsoft Research
  • Daniel Liew, PhD student (thesis) 2013-2017, co-supervised by Cristian Cadar Software Engineer at Apple
  • Peter Collingbourne, postdoc during 2012 Researcher at Google
  • John Wickerson, postdoc 2012-2013 Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London
  • Jeroen Ketema, postdoc 2012-2015 Senior Software Engineer at GitHub
  • Nathan Chong, PhD student (thesis) 2012-2014 Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services
  • Adam Betts, postdoc 2011-2015
  • Paul Thomson, PhD student (thesis) then postdoc, 2011-2017 Software Engineer at Google

Selected recent publications

Full publication list

ECOOP 2025
Amber Gorzynski and Alastair F. Donaldson. FuzzFlesh: Randomised testing of decompilers via control flow graph-based program generation. In 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, 2025.
DOI | pdf ]
ASPLOS 2025
Pingshi Yu, Nicolas Wu, and Alastair F. Donaldson. Ratte: Fuzzing for miscompilations in multi-level compilers using composable semantics. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, 2025.
DOI | pdf ]
ASPLOS 2025
Chengsong Tan, Alastair F. Donaldson, and John Wickerson. Formalising CXL cache coherence. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, 2025.
DOI | pdf ]
ICST 2025
Shahin Honarvar, Mark van der Wilk, and Alastair F. Donaldson. Turbulence: Systematically and automatically testing instruction-tuned large language models for code. In IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, 2025.
DOI | pdf ]
TOSEM 2025
Bachir Bendrissou, Cristian Cadar, and Alastair F. Donaldson. Grammar mutation for testing input parsers. ACM Trans. Softw. Methodol., 2025.
DOI | pdf ]
OOPSLA 2024
Luke Geeson, James Brotherston, Wilco Dijkstra, Alastair F. Donaldson, Lee Smith, Tyler Sorensen, and John Wickerson. Mix testing: Specifying and testing ABI compatibility of C/C++ atomics implementations. Proc. ACM on Programming Languages, 8(OOPSLA), 2024.
DOI | pdf ]
ICST 2024
Alastair F. Donaldson, Dilan Sheth, Jean-Baptiste Tristan, and Alex Usher. Randomised testing of the compiler for a verification-aware programming language. In IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, 2024. Best Industry Paper award.
DOI | pdf ]
EuroSys 2024
Jack Clark, Alastair F. Donaldson, John Wickerson, and Manuel Rigger. Validating database system isolation level implementations with version certificate recovery. In European Conference on Computer Systems, 2024. Best Paper award.
DOI | pdf ]
ISSTA 2023
Karine Even-Mendoza, Arindam Sharma, Alastair F. Donaldson, and Cristian Cadar. GrayC: Greybox fuzzing of compilers and analysers for C. In ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, 2023. Distinguished Paper award.
DOI | pdf ]
PLDI 2023
Bastien Lecoeur, Hasan Mohsin, and Alastair F. Donaldson. Program reconditioning: Avoiding undefined behaviour when finding and reducing compiler bugs. Proc. ACM on Programming Languages, 7(PLDI), 2023.
DOI | pdf ]
POPL 2023
Vasileios Klimis, Jack Clark, Alan Baker, David Neto, John Wickerson, and Alastair F. Donaldson. Taking back control in an intermediate representation for GPU computing. Proc. ACM on Programming Languages, 7(POPL), 2023.
DOI | pdf ]

Contact

For enquiries about the FastPL research group, contact Alastair F. Donaldson

Thank you to John Wickerson for the design on which this website is based