Biography/Career Progression
1999 to 2003 PhD in systems verification, University of
Twente, The Netherlands
2003 to 2007 Postdoctoral researcher, Queen Mary,
University of London
2007 to 2013 RAEng/EPSRC Research Fellowship
2009 to Present Founding partner and originally CEO of
Monoidics
2012 to Present Professor of Software Verification,
Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary, University
of London
Other support
Professor Distefano’ s work has been
an inspiration for many other research
programmes, including University of
California, Berkeley and Princeton
University. His collaborations span
across academic organisations and
commercial entities such as Microsoft
Research Laboratories at Cambridge.
His company, Monoidics, works
with leading commercial software
companies and is part of a
€4.1 million European-funded research
programme. He is also backed by
EPSRC (The Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council) funding of
more than £750,000.
Research impact
“Software engineering is everywhere
but it is still a very new discipline. In
other parts of engineering that have
been around for a long time, such as
building bridges, for example, you have
a strong mathematical foundation that
gives engineers tools that enable them
to build a model and know that the
bridge isn’t going to collapse. Software
engineering is a young branch of
engineering and we are just now
developing these kinds of mathematical
tools,” Professor Distefano said. The
automatic verification essentially
constructs a mathematical model of
what a complex software program
will do when it runs and identifies
any undesired behaviours. The tools
deduce the behaviours without actually
running the software and flag up
errors.
“For industrial software, to do this
manually
would take an army of PhD people but
now an engineer can just press the
button and it does it automatically,”
Professor Distefano said.
The initial impact of this work has been
in areas where software performance is
safety critical: aerospace, automotive
industries, defence and power. Modern
aircraft and cars, for example, have
tens of millions of lines of code
inside them, often controlling critical
functions.
Leading companies, therefore, have
long been keen to verify the software
they use. Professor Distefano believes
that automation will soon make this
a mainstream technology: “Before,
it was elite and expensive, and you
needed experts to do it. Now everyone
can use it.”
Professor Distegano sees particular
application in areas such as the
operating systems of mobile
phones, where the software
suppliers and network operators
are under extreme pressure
to innovate constantly. “This
provides a means to keep the
quality standards that they need
while remaining innovative,” he
said.
One of Professor Distefano’s major
and most recent achievements has
been the acquisition of Monoidics,
a company he co-founded in 2009,
by Facebook. “Monoidics specialises
in WF