Professor Jim Woodcock

He is also the Professor of Digital Twins at Aarhus University in Denmark and the 1,000-talents Professor of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and State Distinguished Expert at Southwest University at Chongqing in China. He currently leads the research team in York for the Verifiability Research Node in the EPSRC Trusted Autonomous Systems Programme. He is a long-term consultant to the UK government on system security verification, including co-authoring a secure office automation system for the UK government. He is the editor-in-chief of the Association for Computing Machinery journal Formal Aspects of Computing and the editor-in-chief of the Cambridge University Press journal Research Directions: Cyber Physical Systems. He is a fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering and a Chartered Engineer. He has served as head of the Centre of Excellence in Software Engineering in Oxford and head of the Department of Computer Science in York.

He is an award-winning researcher with over 40 years' experience in formal methods for software engineering. He has widely cited theoretical work in efficient verification algorithms for security and in software and hardware semantics and verification. For the last decade, he has researched the theory and practice of CPS and, more recently, verified robotics and digital twins. He leads the research team that is developing theories for modelling and verifying CPS and robotics using the Isabelle/UTP theorem prover.

His work has been widely used in practice in government, nuclear, aerospace, railways, and banking. He made significant contributions to the Oxford-IBM project formalising the CICS transaction processing system that culminated in the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement. He helped create the theory and practical verification for NatWest Bank's Mondex smart-card system, the first commercial product to achieve ITSEC Level E6 (Common Criteria EAL 7). He made significant contributions to the experimental strand of the Verified Software Initiative. He was principal investigator in the EU FP7 COMPASS project on model-based systems of systems and in the EU H2020 INTO-CPS project on integrated toolchains for CPS.