Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield
Member of the Testing research group.
My email address is n.walkinshaw_@_sheffield.ac.uk
My research interests lie in the testing and analysis of complex software systems (and cyber-physical systems). I am particularly interested in finding ways to test "hard to test" systems, with long execution times, non-determinism, and large input / output spaces.
My research explores techniques to support testing in traditionally difficult domains, such as complex input spaces, cyber-physical systems, and systems with long execution times. Much of my recent research has focused on the application of Causal Inference to test causal relationships between inputs and outputs in scientific software models (funded by the EPSRC CITCOM project). I have written up more details on this work in the CITCOM project page.
I have a longstanding interest in techniques that help to understand the sequential behaviour of systems when a prior model is unavailable. Key contributions in this area include:
Second-order uncertainty is concerned with quantifying the (un-)certainty surrounding a probability. This arises in many Software Engineering contexts - if not in most contexts where probabilistic reasoning takes place. There are various uncertainty logics out there that provide ways of reasoning about probabilities in this way. My initial forays into this area used an approach called Evidential Reasoning. I then adopted Subjective Logic, because it is more flexible and expressive. Anything you can do with a conventional probability can be extended to Subjective Logic, and thus incorporate second-order uncertainties. Key works in this area include:
I am very fortunate to teach topics that are proximate to my research interests. My current topics include:
I am currently the school lead on inclusion in Computer Science. In a nutshell, this has a focus on attracting more diverse cohorts of students into Computer Science. This is a partial objective of the Computer Science Ambassador's module described above. We are also a node in the BCS Levelling Up scheme, where several of our undergraduate students tutor groups of school children to achieve the Maths A-Level (a key entry requirement for most Computer Science courses).