Chris George

Personal details

My involvement in computing started when I joined STL in England in 1979 after 10 years teaching English and Mathematics in schools and technical colleges. My main interest quickly became formal methods, specifically development methods and tool support for them. I was involved in the ESPRIT RAISE project from 1985 to 1990 and then joined CRI in Denmark as project coordinator of the ESPRIT LaCoS project.

I joined the United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST) in September 1994 as Senior Research Fellow for Advanced Development Projects. I served as Acting Director from February 2002 until December 2004, and was then Associate Director until I reached the UN retirement age in 2009. As a Research Fellow I did research, tutored fellows from developing countries, and presented training courses in various developing countries. With the help of a number of UNU-IIST fellows I developed a new set of tools for RAISE.

In 2006 I became interested in the problem of providing free, open source software for water management, aiming particularly at scientists and water managers in developing countries. Existing tools are typically very expensive because they rely on expensive Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Together with UNU-INWEH I started a project WaterBase to provide tools, resources, and a source of help on water management.

Late in 2009 I joined McMaster University's Centre for Software Certification as Operations Manager.

Main publications

• The RAISE Language, Method and Tools (co-author). Formal Aspects of Computing, Vol 1 No 1, 1989.

• Heap Storage. In Case Studies in Systematic Software Development, Prentice Hall, 1990.

• Specifying and refining concurrent systems (with Robert Milne). In 3rd Refinement Workshop, Springer-Verlag, 1990.

• The RAISE Specification Language: A Tutorial. In VDM'91: Formal Software Development methods, tutorials, LNCS 552.

• The NDB database specified in the RAISE Specification Language. Formal Aspects of Computing, Vol 4 No 1, 1992.

• A Concurrency Case Study using RAISE (with Anne Haxthausen). In FME'93: Industrial-Strength Formal Methods, proceedings, LNCS 670.

• The RAISE Development Method (co-author). Prentice Hall, 1995

• A Theory of Distributing Train Rescheduling. In FME'96: Industrial Benefits and Advances in Formal Methods, proceedings, LNCS 1051,

• Combining and Distributing Hierarchical Systems (with Do Tien Dung), in Requirements Targeting Software and Systems Engineering, LNCS 1526, 1998.

• Scheduling and Rescheduling of Trains (with Dines Bjoerner and Soeren Prehn), in Industrial-Strength Formal Methods in Practice, Springer-Verlag, 1999.

• An Operational Semantics for Timed RAISE (with Xia Yong), in FM'99 proceedings, LNCS 1709, 1999.

• Proving safety of authentication protocols: a minimal approach, in International Conference on Software: Theory and Practice (ICS2000), 2000.

• Specification Case Studies in RAISE (main editor), Springer-Verlag, 2002.

• The Logic of the RAISE Specification Language (with Anne Haxthausen) in Computing and Informatics, volume 22, nos 3-4, 2003.

• When Specification-based Testing Fails (with Bernhard K. Aichernig) in Model Based Testing 2006 proceedings, Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 2006.

• Specification and Proof of the Mondex Electronic Purse (with Anne Haxthausen) in Formal Aspects of Computing, Vol 20, 2008.

• WaterBase: SWAT in an Open Source GIS (with Luis Leon) in The Open Hydrology Journal Vol 2, 2008.

• Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT): Global Applications (co-editor), World Association of Soil and Water Conservation, 2009.

Contact details

• e-mail: cgeorge@mcmaster.ca
• tel: +1 905 525 9140 Ext 21618
• fax: +1 905 524 0340