Alastair F. Donaldson (Ally)
Ally is a (Full) Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, and leader of the Multicore Programming Group.
Ally co-teaches a course on Object-Oriented Programming. He previously developed and co-taught a course on Software Reliability.
Ally has served as Deputy Director of Undergraduate Studies (August 2014-September 2016), Faculty Sponsor for the Department’s ACM Student Chapter (July 2016-August 2018) and cohort mentor for second year PhD students (July 2013-January 2014).
Multicore Programming Group
The Multicore Programming Group‘s research aim is to help software developers in the construction of applications that are both reliable (ideally, they do not go wrong; realistically, they do not go wrong too often) and efficient (they run quickly and do not consume too much energy). These are competing aims: optimising software for performance and energy-efficiency is challenging, and even the most skilled developers risk introducing serious flaws into a system during the process of optimisation. Our work attempts to help this situation by providing formal verification and testing techniques to help expert programmers write correct low-level software, and high-level programming models from which efficient implementations can be generated to allow non-expert programmers to avoid the pitfalls of hand-optimisation.
The group’s work has traditionally focused on software for multicore and manycore systems, hence the name of the group, but in recent years the group’s interests have expanded to encompass techniques for improving software reliability in general.
Ally’s Bio
September 2020-present: Professor, Department of Computing, Imperial College London
August 2018-present: Software Engineer, Google
December 2017-August 2018: Director, GraphicsFuzz Ltd. (acquired by Google in August 2018)
September 2017-August 2020: Reader, Department of Computing, Imperial College London
August 2014-August 2017: Senior Lecturer, Department of Computing, Imperial College London
November 2011-July 2014: Lecturer, Department of Computing, Imperial College London
August-September 2011: Visiting Researcher, RiSE Group, Microsoft Research Redmond
January 2010-August 2011: Research Fellow, Wolfson College Oxford
May 2009-August 2011: EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, working in the Formal Verification Group, led by Daniel Kroening
January 2007-May 2009: Research Engineer at Codeplay Software Ltd.
July-September 2005: Summer intern, Graham Technology
October 2003-June 2007: PhD in Computing Science, Department (now School) of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, supervised by Alice Miller
June-September 2002: Summer intern, Reuters Plc.
October 1999-July 2003: BSc (hons, First Class) in Computing Science and Mathematics (combined), University of Glasgow
Ally is married to Chris, who runs Little Wild Things. They have three kids, Poppy, Felix and Kitty, two cats, Jekyll and Minty, and a dog, Caspar.