Les Hatton is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

-born computer scientist

Computer scientist

A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....

 and mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

 most notable for his work in failures and vulnerabilities in software controlled systems.

He was educated at King's College, Cambridge

King's College, Cambridge

King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college's full name is "The King's College of our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge", but it is usually referred to simply as "King's" within the University....

 1967-1970 and the University of Manchester

University of Manchester

The University of Manchester is a public research university located in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is a "red brick" university and a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive British universities and the N8 Group...

 where he received the degree of Ph.D in 1973 for his work on the dynamical structure of Tornadoes.

Although originally a geophysicist during which time he was awarded the 1987 Conrad Schlumberger Award

Conrad Schlumberger Award

The Conrad Schlumberger Award is an award given to one of the members of European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers. The award is given each year to one that has made an outstanding contribution over a period of time to the scientific and technical advancement of the geosciences,...

 for his work in computational geophysics, he switched careers in the early 1990s to study software and systems failure. He has published 4 books and over 100 refereed journal publications and his theoretical and experimental work on software systems failure can be found in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Computer, IEEE Software and IEEE Computational Science and Engineering. His book Safer C pioneered the use of safer language subsets in commercial embedded control systems. He was also cited amongst the leading scholars of systems and software engineering by the Journal of Systems and Software for the period 1997-2001.

Primarily a computer scientist nowadays, he retains wide interests and has published recently on artificial complexity in mobile phone charging, the aerodynamics of javelins and novel bibliographic search algorithms for unstructured text in order to extract patterns from defect databases.

After spending most of his career in industry, he is currently a professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 of Forensic Software Engineering at Kingston University

Kingston University

Kingston University is a public research university located in Kingston upon Thames, southwest London, United Kingdom. It was originally founded in 1899 as Kingston Technical Institute, a polytechnic, and became a university in 1992....

, London.

External links

• Publications and Writing
• Oakwood Computing Associates Ltd. (Managing director)