Professor Peter O'Hearn
Engineering Manager, Facebook; Professor of Computer Science, University College London
As well as having made profound contributions to methods for checking and reasoning about computer programs, Professor O’Hearn has made a major commitment to ensuring that these ideas are used in practice. Among his most important innovations, ‘separation logic’ has spawned a whole research field. He founded a spinout company that built software tools that either detect errors in complex computer code or provide evidence of their absence. The company, Monoidics, has subsequently been acquired by Facebook where he now works with a group that is impacting the software production process.