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Greenfoot is a software system to support the learning of programming at school level (age 13 upwards). During the REF period, over a million students worldwide have learned programming through Greenfoot: at school, in after school clubs and workshops, and privately at home. Greenfoot has helped to raise the profile of programming in schools and outside in a number of countries. The research described here has had impact on a variety of stakeholders, including pupils, teachers and those involved in national curriculum development. Greenfoot is currently downloaded more than 350,000 times/year and is in active use in thousands of schools. Greenfoot is one of very few systems, internationally, to have this level of impact on programming education.
Modern processor architectures (networked multi/many-core nodes), together with society's expectation of evermore-complex applications, require fluent mastery of concurrency. To enable this mastery, in the last two decades our group has taught, researched and developed fundamental notions of concurrency, new programming languages (occam-pi, and the KRoC toolset), libraries (JCSP, CCSP, C++CSP, CHP), runtime systems (the KRoC/CCSP multicore scheduler) and tools based on formal process algebra (Hoare's CSP, and Milner's pi-calculus).
Our work has had impact in providing new mechanisms for software development in a number of sectors such as chip design, large-scale real-time systems, formal interfaces and testing and the space industry. Testimonials supporting this are available from a variety of industrial and commercial sources (NXP Semiconductors, Big Bee Consultants, Philips Healthcare, 4Links Ltd. and Microsoft Research Cambridge). The breadth of impact of the work is evidenced by download statistics, as well as by third-party contributions to libraries and documentation.
The impact of the research is evident in two areas of software engineering practice connected through software fault-proneness: (i) improper use of `design patterns', recognised reusable templates for how to design code; and (ii) the real benefits of `refactoring', a technique whereby code is intentionally changed by a developer to improve its efficiency and/or make it easier to read. Application of the research findings has led to significant impacts on software development at BancTec Ltd., a medium-sized, international IT company which, as a result, has changed its practices, challenging established approaches in industrial IT. The research has had, and continues to have, direct and sustained impact at BancTec through changed commercial practice and raised awareness of internal standards; this has led to increased training of developers and rollout of new internal software development standards in the UK and India, and as a template world-wide for 2,000 employees in 50 countries.
Semmle is a successful spin-out company set up by members of the UoA, based on their research on program analysis. Semmle markets an industrial-strength product allowing organisations with large software systems to understand and manage their code bases. This business intelligence platform started to be sold to prominent customers in 2008, including [text removed for publication] NASA. NASA used it to help ensure the safe landing of the Curiosity Mars Rover.
The spin-out company CSM Ltd. was set up in 1991 to commercially develop Durham research on program transformation. Up until 1999, this company (which in the mid-90's became Durham Software Engineering Ltd. and subsequently Software Migrations Ltd.) and researchers at Durham University developed the FermaT Workbench: an industrial-strength assembler re-engineering workbench for program comprehension, migration and re-engineering. In 1999, Software Migrations Ltd. relocated to St. Albans and now has an extensive list of national and international clients. All its products (software and services) are built on the FermaT Workbench and has generated considerable revenue with this revenue strongly expected to rise steeply in the near future.
Memory violations are a major cause of security breaches and operational flaws in today's software systems. Proving memory safety was traditionally a core challenge in program verification due to the high complexity of reasoning about pointer manipulations. Researchers at Queen Mary and Imperial jointly produced breakthrough algorithms for automatically reasoning about pointers, enabling highly-scalable automatic verification for industrial code. These techniques resulted in the industrial program analysis tool INFER developed by Monoidics Ltd, and used by customers across the world. The verification algorithms developed at Queen Mary and Imperial were also incorporated in Microsoft tools used to secure Windows device drivers.