Prof. Bev Littlewood

Contact Details:

Email: b.littlewood@csr.city.ac.uk 

Phone: +44 (0) 20 7040 8420

Room: A229 College Building

Position: 

Professor of Software Engineering

Biography:

Bev Littlewood has degrees in mathematics and statistics, and a PhD in statistics and computer science; he is a Chartered Engineer, and a Chartered Statistician. He has worked for more than 30 years on problems associated with the dependability of software-based systems, and has published many papers in international journals and conference proceedings and has edited several books.

In 1983 he founded the Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) at City University, London, and was its Director from then until his semi-retirement in 2003. During this period CSR attracted many millions of pounds of research funding from various European and UK national agencies such as EPSRC, and industry, and gained an international reputation for the quality of its research. He has successfully managed almost 40 research projects as Principal Investigator. He is currently Professor of Software Engineering at City University.

His technical contributions have largely focused on the application of probabilistic and statistical techniques in software systems engineering. He has published over a hundred scientific papers on topics that include:

He has a long term interest in the question of how far these approaches can take us in providing assurance that systems are fit for purpose - in particular, whether certain critical systems are sufficiently safe to be allowed to operate. He has encouraged - and taken part in - debate about such issues in both technical and non-technical forums. This has involved several TV and radio appearances in documentary and news programmes discussing general issues of software reliability and safety. For example, he presented, and was co-author, of an edition of the BBC2 TV programme, 'Antenna', on safety-critical software.

From 1990 to 2005 he was a member of the UK Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee (NuSAC), in which role he played a part in the extensive discussions, and controversy, concerning the first use of a software-based protection system for a UK power reactor. He chaired the NuSAC Working Group on the use of software in critical applications, which reported to the Health and Safety Commission in 1998. Its report was published as 'The Use of Computers in Safety-critical Applications' (www.hse.gov.uk/nuclear/computers.pdf).

His professional activities related to his scientific work are numerous. He is a member of the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC), and is a past member of the EPSRC College for Computing. He is currently serving his third term as an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans on Software Engineering, the premier journal in SE. He is on the editorial boards of several other international journals. He is a member of IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Reliable Computing and Fault Tolerance. He was a member of the British Computer Society's Safety Critical Systems Task Force until its recent untimely demise. He was the only non-US member of the Panel on Statistical Methods in Software Engineering (1992-4), convened by the US National Research Council. He was a member of the HSC Working Group that wrote the influential 'Tolerability of Risk from Nuclear Power Stations', being responsible for the section on the contribution of critical computing systems to risk. From 2007 until 2009 he was a member of the IEEE John von Neumann Award Committee. He is currently a member of the IEEE Computer Society's Harlan D Mills Award Committee.

He has been a consultant to many organizations and companies in Europe and the US. As consultant to Harlan Mills' IBM Fellow Department in the 1980s, BL gave advice on the statistical underpinnings of the well-known Cleanroom approach to software development and evaluation.

BL has been a member of the programme committees of many international conferences, including several ICSEs. He has given keynote addresses and invited talks at numerous conferences.

In 2007 he was the recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's prestigious Harlan D Mills Award, the citation of which reads: "For leading research on the application of rigorous probabilistic and statistical techniques in software engineering, particularly in systems dependability".

Research interests:

• Reliability and safety modeling of software-based systems
• Software fault tolerance
• Software testing
• Dependability cases for software-based systems