The products of Software Engineering and Software Technology seem currently to be less reliable than their more traditional Engineering counterparts. Part of the reason is that, being digital, they are readily redeployed in unanticipated contexts, thus amplifying a problem experienced even for `physical' products. But another, more telling, reason is that Software Engineering lacks an accepted basis equivalent to the differentiable calculus in Engineering. There differentiable equations are used to specify behaviour and the calculus used to analyse and simulate it.

Jeff Sanders's interests lie in the development and promotion of methods that do the same thing for Software Engineering. The aim, of course, is accountably correct information systems. Formal specifications form the Software Engineer's first important technique; by capturing precisely the functional behaviour of a system they promote its accurate reuse in differing contexts. Formal descriptions at varying levels of abstraction are the Software Engineer's equivalent of approximation in the calculus, and enable a realistically complex system to be understood or developed incrementally top-down. And criteria for conformance of descriptions at differing levels of abstraction underpin the correctness of that enterprise. Required are laws, that can be automated and readily used, and semantic models to establish their soundness.

Thus new theory is needed; and realistic applications are required to validate its power. This approach relies on the inseparability of theory and realistic application. Important applications include: concurrent systems, web services, asynchronous hardware, probabilistic systems, systems with mutable data structures, adaptable multi-agent systems, secure systems and massive software systems. A current important technique involves top-down refinement by splitting the level of atomicity.

Jeff Sanders has taught across the range of undergraduate and graudate courses in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science, has supervised 15 PhD students, more than 40 MSc students and 6 postdoctoral researchers.

Since joining UNU-IIST in February 2007, Jeff Sanders has completed missions, supervised and advised students, presented seminars and released papers first as UNU-IIST technical reports. He is principal investigator of the PEARL project, supported by the Macao Science and Technology Development Fund.