PhD opportunity: Automated Testing and Verification of Machine Learning Compilers and Runtimes
We are looking to recruit a PhD student to start in October 2025 to work on an exciting project on automated testing and verification for ML compilers and runtime systems. See here for details. The studentship is fully-funded but only covers UK home rate tuition fees; please check here to see whether you are eligible for home rate fees.
Candidates would need to have (or to be shortly awarded) a Distinction in a Masters (or equivalent) in Computer Science (or a related discipline).
Email Alastair Donaldson before 30th April if you are interested in applying!
People
Current research group members
- Alastair F. Donaldson, group leader
- Bachir Bendrissou, PhD student since 2022 (co-supervised by Cristian Cadar)
- Amber Gorzynski, PhD student since 2023
- Shahin Honarvar, PhD student since 2022
- James Lee-Jones, PhD student since 2024
- Jacob Yu, PhD student since 2022 (co-supervised by Nicolas Wu)
Former research group members
- Haoyang Ma, Vising Researcher 2024-2025
- Chengsong Tan, postdoc 2022-2024, jointly advised by John Wickerson
- Vasileios Klimis, postdoc 2021–2023, jointly advised by John Wickerson ➔ Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.
- Jack Clark, research assistant 2021-2023, jointly advised by John Wickerson
- Karine Even-Mendoza, postdoc 2020-2022, jointly advised by Cristian Cadar ➔ Lecturer at King’s College London
- Matthew Windsor, postdoc 2018-2021, jointly advised by John Wickerson ➔ software engineer at Anaplan
- Pritam Gharat, postdoc 2018-2021, jointly advised by Cristian Cadar ➔ Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research India
- Michael Marcozzi, postdoc 2018-2020, jointly advised by Cristian Cadar ➔ Tenured Researcher at the CEA LIST institute from Université Paris-Saclay
- Qiyi Tang, postdoc 2018-2019, jointly advised by Cristian Cadar ➔ Lecturer at the University of Liverpool
- David MacIver, PhD student, 2017-2021 ➔ independent software developer, writer and consultant
- Dan Iorga, PhD student (thesis) then posdoc, 2017-2022, co-supervised by John Wickerson ➔ Staff Engineer at Qualcomm
- Hugues Evrard, postdoc 2016-2018 ➔ Software Engineer at Google
- Tyler Sorensen, PhD student (thesis) 2015-2018 ➔ Assistant Professor at University of California Santa Cruz
- Ethel Morgan, PhD student 2015-2017
- Andrei Lascu, research assistant then PhD student (thesis) 2014-2021 ➔ Postdoc at King’s College London
- Christopher Lidbury, PhD student (thesis) 2014-2019 ➔ Software Engineer in industry
- Victor Magron, postdoc 2014-2015, jointly advised by George Constantinides ➔ Researcher at CNRS, Tolouse
- Pantazis Deligiannis, PhD student (thesis) 2013-2016 ➔ Principal Research Software Engineer at Microsoft Research
- Daniel Liew, PhD student (thesis) 2013-2017, co-supervised by Cristian Cadar ➔ Software Engineer at Apple
- Peter Collingbourne, postdoc during 2012 ➔ Researcher at Google
- John Wickerson, postdoc 2012-2013 ➔ Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London
- Jeroen Ketema, postdoc 2012-2015 ➔ Senior Software Engineer at GitHub
- Nathan Chong, PhD student (thesis) 2012-2014 ➔ Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services
- Adam Betts, postdoc 2011-2015
- Paul Thomson, PhD student (thesis) then postdoc, 2011-2017 ➔ Software Engineer at Google
Selected recent publications
- ASPLOS 2025
-
Pingshi Yu, Nicolas Wu, and Alastair F. Donaldson.
Ratte: Fuzzing for miscompilations in multi-level compilers using
composable semantics.
In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on
Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems,
ASPLOS 2025, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, March 30-April 3, 2025. ACM,
2025.
To appear.
[ pdf ] - ASPLOS 2025
-
Chengsong Tan, Alastair F. Donaldson, and John Wickerson.
Formalising CXL cache coherence.
In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on
Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems,
ASPLOS 2025, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, March 30-April 3, 2025. ACM,
2025.
To appear.
[ pdf ] - TOSEM 2024
-
Bachir Bendrissou, Cristian Cadar, and Alastair F. Donaldson.
Grammar mutation for testing input parsers.
ACM Trans. Softw. Methodol., 2024.
[ DOI | pdf ] - OOPSLA 2024
-
Luke Geeson, James Brotherston, Wilco Dijkstra, Alastair F. Donaldson, Lee
Smith, Tyler Sorensen, and John Wickerson.
Mix testing: Specifying and testing ABI compatibility of C/C++
atomics implementations.
Proc. ACM on Programming Languages, 8(OOPSLA), 2024.
[ DOI | pdf ] - ICST 2024
-
Alastair F. Donaldson, Dilan Sheth, Jean-Baptiste Tristan, and Alex Usher.
Randomised testing of the compiler for a verification-aware
programming language.
In IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and
Validation, 2024.
Best Industry Paper award.
[ DOI | pdf ] - EuroSys 2024
-
Jack Clark, Alastair F. Donaldson, John Wickerson, and Manuel Rigger.
Validating database system isolation level implementations with
version certificate recovery.
In European Conference on Computer Systems, 2024.
Best Paper award.
[ DOI | pdf ] - ISSTA 2023
-
Karine Even-Mendoza, Arindam Sharma, Alastair F. Donaldson, and Cristian
Cadar.
GrayC: Greybox fuzzing of compilers and analysers for C.
In ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and
Analysis, 2023.
Distinguished Paper award.
[ DOI | pdf ] - PLDI 2023
-
Bastien Lecoeur, Hasan Mohsin, and Alastair F. Donaldson.
Program reconditioning: Avoiding undefined behaviour when finding and
reducing compiler bugs.
Proc. ACM on Programming Languages, 7(PLDI), 2023.
[ DOI | pdf ] - POPL 2023
-
Vasileios Klimis, Jack Clark, Alan Baker, David Neto, John Wickerson, and
Alastair F. Donaldson.
Taking back control in an intermediate representation for GPU
computing.
Proc. ACM on Programming Languages, 7(POPL), 2023.
[ DOI | pdf ] - PLDI 2021
-
Alastair F. Donaldson, Paul Thomson, Vasyl Teliman, Stefano Milizia,
André Perez Maselco, and Antoni Karpinski.
Test-case reduction and deduplication almost for free with
transformation-based compiler testing.
In ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language
Design and Implementation, 2021.
[ DOI | pdf ]