Nathan Chong from Imperial College London has been announced as the overall winner in a prestigious UK competition for his work on GPUVerify (the verification technique and tool for the automatic analysis of GPU kernels written in OpenCL). The award recognises researchers who are pioneers in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Fifteen researchers showcased the commercial potential and business impact of their research at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Research Exhibition and Awards Ceremony.
“These pioneering ICT researchers demonstrate why the UK is an excellent place to do research. Progress within ICT research will drive forward innovative technologies for the benefit of us all,” said Professor Philip Nelson, Chief Executive of EPSRC.
Nathan said, “My research is essentially about helping programmers write better programs. I want to live in a world where technology is everywhere but also where it is correct, reliable and safe. One way of doing that is with static verification technology. The tool I’ve built is starting to show its usefulness to industry.”
Nathan is a key contributor to GPUVerify, a verification technique and tool for the automatic analysis of GPU kernels. This work has been published at top conferences in programming languages and verification, disseminated in a wide-range of academic and industry tutorials, and recently won a HiPEAC award to aid the technology transfer of this research into industry. Nathan was an intern at Microsoft Research with the Programming Principles and Tools group in 2012. Prior to joining Imperial, Nathan was a researcher for ARM and worked on hardware and software at different levels of the system stack, including CPU virtualisation (now found in the ARMv7 architecture), cache coherence verification (now in AMBA4 ACE) and weak memory models. His work is supported by the FP7 CARP (Correct and Efficient Accelerator Programming) and EPSRC PSL (Particle Science Language) projects.
Read the announcement: http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/ukictpioneers2014/
Read Nathan’s GPUVerifiy Poster: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nyc04/ict-poster.pdf