Andrew D. Gordon is a British computer scientist employed by Microsoft Research. His research interests include

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

design,

formal methods In computer science, formal methods are mathematically rigorous techniques for the specification, development, and verification of software and hardware systems. The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the exp ...

, concurrency,

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...

, and access control.

Biography

Gordon earned a Ph.D. from the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

in 1992. Until 1997 Gordon was a Research Fellow at the

University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory The Department of Computer Science and Technology, formerly the Computer Laboratory, is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. it employed 35 academic staff, 25 support staff, 35 affiliated research staff, and about 15 ...

. He then joined the Microsoft Research laboratory in Cambridge, England, where he is a principal researcher in the Programming Principles and Tools group. He also holds a professorship at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

Research

Gordon is one of the designers of

Concurrent Haskell Concurrent Haskell extends Haskell 98 with explicit concurrency. Its two main underlying concepts are: * A primitive type MVar α implementing a bounded/single-place asynchronous channel, which is either empty or holds a value of type α. * The ...

, a

functional programming language In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that ...

with explicit primitives for concurrency. He is the co-designer with Martin Abadi of spi calculus, an extension of the

π-calculus In theoretical computer science, the -calculus (or pi-calculus) is a process calculus. The -calculus allows channel names to be communicated along the channels themselves, and in this way it is able to describe concurrent computations whose netw ...

for formalized reasoning about cryptographic systems. He and

Luca Cardelli Luca Andrea Cardelli, Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), is an Italian computer scientist who is a research professor at the University of Oxford in Oxford, UK. Cardelli is well known for his research in type theory and operational semantics. A ...

invented the ambient calculus for reasoning about

mobile code In distributed computing, code mobility is the ability for running programs, code or objects to be migrated (or moved) from one machine or application to another. This is the process of moving mobile code across the nodes of a network as opposed ...

. With Moritz Y. Becker and Cédric Fournet, Gordon also designed

SecPAL SecPAL is a declarative, logic-based, security policy language that has been developed to support the complex access control requirements of large scale distributed computing environments. Common access control requirements Here is a partial-list ...

, a

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

specification language A specification language is a formal language in computer science used during systems analysis, requirements analysis, and systems design to describe a system at a much higher level than a programming language, which is used to produce the execu ...

for access control policies.

Awards and honours

Gordon's Ph.D. thesis, ''Functional Programming and Input/Output'', won the 1993 Distinguished Dissertation Award of the British Computer Society. His 2000 paper on the ambient calculus subject with Luca Cardelli, "Anytime, Anywhere: Modal Logics for Mobile Ambients", won the 2010

SIGPLAN SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on programming languages. Conferences * Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) * Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) * International Symposium on ...

Most Influential POPL Paper Award.SIGPLAN awards
, retrieved 2012-02-01.

References

External links

Home page
at Microsoft Research * {{DEFAULTSORT:Gordon, Andrew D. Year of birth missing (living people) Living people British computer scientists Formal methods people Members of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Academics of the University of Edinburgh Programming language researchers