| Martin Henson is a Professor
of Computer Science at the University of Essex, and immediate
past Dean for International Affairs, leading the development
and implementation of the University's International Strategic
Agenda and Global Alliance project. Between 2000 and 2006
he was Head of the School of Computer Science and Electronic
Systems. He holds a Visiting Chair in Computer Science at
the University of Waikato in New Zealand and is a Fellow of
the British Computer Society and the Royal Society of Arts.
His research activities focus on formal methods for software
engineering, initially in the area of Functional Programming,
with a special emphasis on program verification and transformation.
He wrote an early book in this area, for Oxford University
Press with an emphasis on these topics, in the late eighties.
During the first half of the next decade he published widely
in the area of applications of constructive mathematical methods
for software science, with an emphasis on specification and
program derivation. This work was based on Feferman-style
theories designed expressly for the purpose. Limitations of
these theories for expressing program derivations led him
to explore issues in "vernacular reasoning": investigating
the relationship between concise informal and verbose formalised
arguments. Other limitations, in the area of specification,
resulted in an interest in specification languages such as
Z. After early attempts to constructive Z, his joint work
with Steve Reeves at the University of Waikato in New Zealand
on Z logic and (classical) logic-based program derivation
from Z specifications, led most recently to his most recent
contribution: the wide-spectrum logic nuZ, which is the subject
of his keynote at IC3.
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