SRI International Computer Science Laboratory

John Rushby

Position:: Program Director for Formal Methods and Dependable Systems
Address:: Computer Science Laboratory
SRI International
333 Ravenswood Ave
Menlo Park California 94025, USA
Email: Rushby@csl.sri.com. Please note: I've had this email address for 30 years and receive over 1,000 Spam emails a day--so I have had to resort to using SRI's corporate Brightmail filter in series with SpamAssassin operating in a fully automatic mode. If I don't reply to your email in a reasonable length of time, it's possible that it fell foul of the spam filters. Please try to reach me in some other way.
Fax: 650/859-2844
Tel: 650/859-xxxx

I know this page has an early-90's look to it (that's when I wrote it--and probably when that photo was taken). I'll change to a more modern style soon.

Research Interests

I am primarily interested in the design and assurance of "critical systems", including properties such as security and safety, mechanisms such as kernelization and fault tolerance, and formal methods for assurance. I consider the main value of formal methods to lie in the ability to construct mathematical models whose properties can be analyzed and verified by computational means. This has led me to focus on the development of effective tools for formal methods. Most recently (and successfully) this has been PVS, which was primarily constructed by my colleagues Sam Owre and Natarajan Shankar, and is now joined by SAL and Yices.

Publications

Reports and papers written or coauthored by me that deal with these topics are available here.

Awards

I am very pleased and honored to be the recipient of the IEEE Harlan D Mills Award for 2011,
And, together with Sam Owre and Shankar, of the CAV Award for 2012.

Background

I was born in London and grew up in its suburbs, where I attended Dartford Grammar School. I then went to study in the distant North at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, receiving BSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science 1971 and 1977 respectively.

My first job was as a "higher scientific officer" at (what was then) the Atlas Computer Laboratory (now part of the Computation and Information Department of The Central Laboratory of the UK Research Councils), where I worked with computer graphics and early animation systems. Here's a link to a picture of me working on the then state-of-the-art FR80 microfilm recorder. From 1974 to 1975, I was a lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Manchester University, and from 1975 to 1979, I was a research associate in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from 1979 to 1982, before joining SRI in 1983.

At SRI, I was successively a Computer Scientist, Senior Computer Scientist, Program Manager and, from 1986 to 1990, the Acting Director of CSL. In 1991, to my relief, Mark Moriconi took over as Director, and I assumed my present position.

I live in Redwood Shores, which is legally part of Redwood City, though physically disjoint from it and actually closer to Belmont and San Carlos. The big news in my neighborhood is closure of the levees for recreational purposes to protect a species of mouse.

Incidentally, Redwood City claims to have the best climate in the USA ("weather best, by government test"), though it's actually pretty similar to the rest of the Bay Area. Here's the current forecast.

John Rushby: Rushby@csl.sri.com