The University of Western Australia
School of Computer Science and Software Engineering
 
 

School of Computer Science and Software Engineering

Assistant Professor Tim French

Tim is a lecturer in The School of Computer Science & Software Engineering at The University of Western Australia.

Teaching

I am available for consultation in room 2.14 of the computer science and software engineering building on Thursday, 1.00-2.00, during semester. To arrange a meeting outside these times, please email.

Research

My research is on extensions of modal logics, and their applications to formal methods for software engineering. I wrote my PhD thesis on bisimulation quantifiers for modal logics. This work has applications in the automated reasoning about properties of various systems and programs, and particularly for reasoning about different levels of abstraction. Recently, I have also been interested in many epistemic logics and formal langauges, particularly for reasoning about different levels of agent awareness.

The following are unpublished works I have written:
  • Counting points on elliptic curves and applications to cryptography.This was my honours thesis, and isn't strongly related to my current research.
  • A proof of the completeness of PLTL. This paper just fills in the details for the proof given by Gabbay, Pnueli,  Shelah and Stavi, in "On the temporal analysis of fairness" (1980).
  • Bisimulation quantifiers for modal logics. This is my PhD. thesis, and was passed in 2006. It describes the application of bisimulation quantifiers to a range of modal logics and presents several decidability and expressivity results.

Publications

Below is a list of some of my publications, in chronological order.

Students

 I am currently supervising the following graduate students:
  • Mohammad Behdad - Learning Classifier Systems for Fraud Detection
  • Ji Bian
  • Omar Al-Bataineh
  • James Hales
I previously supervised the following graduate students:
  • John McCabe-Dansted - A temporal logic of robustness
  • Nazri Kama - A traceability model for change impact analysis during software development
  • Saeed Danesh

Projects

I will periodically describe Professional Computing, Honours, Masters, and PhD projects I have available here. Please contact me if you are interested in any of these projects.

  • Specifying and refining security policies The project would consider the implementation of tools to support the formal reasoning about security policies. Particularly, we would be interested in representing the knowledge of a group of agents, and how these agents can evolve there knowledge over time. The project will involve implementing known algorithms to automatically determine the correctness of such policies.
  • Automated collection of meta-data from software repositories
    (with A/Prof Mark Reynolds). Software development companies often maintain repositories of software modules they have previously used. To efficiently reuse these modules they must have sufficient meta-data about the modules purpose, and this meta-data is often lacking. This project would look at methods to automatically generate such meta-data.
  • Algorithms for model-checking (with A/Prof Mark Reynolds).
    Model-checking is the process of verifying that an implementation satisfies some formally specified property. This project would investigate the development of efficient algorithms for model-checking complex properties using games. This is a very difficult problem and it is not expected that a complete solution will be produced.
  • Reasoning about Trust
    Trust is an integral concept in many areas such as security (do we trust someone is who they say they are), data management (do we trust a database to keep our personal details private) and sensor networks (do we trust that the data from a sensor is accurate). In many of these applications trust i s dealt with in an ad hoc manner. This project would look at designing theories for reasoning about trust in a general sense. We would be interested in designing algorithms to answer questions such as "how many sensors do I need to trust in order to infer property p?", or "Can I trust agent Alice, and not trust agent Bob at the same time?". The project would establish a common semantic for trust based problems and design some simple algorithms for reasoning about trust.

Pictures

I am on the left. Isaac is in the front. Diane is on the right. And Ethan's hanging around.

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CRICOS Code: 00126G

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