Les Hatton

Les Hatton
Born	5 February 1948
Nationality	British
Fields	Software engineering
Institutions	Kingston University, University of Manchester, University of Cambridge
Alma mater	Kings College, Cambridge
Thesis	On the dynamics of concentrated atmospheric vortices (1973)
Known for	Safer C book
Notable awards	Conrad Schlumberger Award (1987)
Website www.leshatton.org

Les Hatton (born 5 February 1948) is a British-born computer scientist and mathematician most notable for his work in failures and vulnerabilities in software controlled systems.

He was educated at King's College, Cambridge 1967–1970 and the University of Manchester where he received a Master of Science degree in electrostatic waves in relativistic plasma^[1] and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1973^[2] for his work on computational fluid dynamics in tornadoes.

Although originally a geophysicist during which time he was awarded the 1987 Conrad Schlumberger Award^[3] for his work in computational geophysics, he switched careers in the early 1990s to study software and systems failure. He has published 4 books and over 100 refereed journal publications^[4][5] and his theoretical and experimental work on software systems failure can be found in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering,^[6] IEEE Computer,^[7] IEEE Software,^[8][9] Nature,^[10] and IEEE Computational Science and Engineering.^[11] His book Safer C ^[12] pioneered the use of safer language subsets in commercial embedded control systems. He was also cited amongst the leading scholars of systems and software engineering by the Journal of Systems and Software for the period 1997–2001.

Primarily a computer scientist nowadays, he retains wide interests and has published recently on artificial complexity in mobile phone charging, the aerodynamics of javelins and novel bibliographic search algorithms for unstructured text in order to extract patterns from defect databases.^[13]

After spending most of his career in industry working for Oakwood Computing Associates,^[14] he is currently a professor of Forensic Software Engineering at Kingston University, London.^[3]

References

1. Hatton, Les (1971). Electrostatic waves in a relativistic plasma (MSc thesis). University of Manchester.
2. Hatton, Les (1973). On the dynamics of concentrated atmospheric vortices (PhD thesis). University of Manchester.
3. "Prof Les Hatton Esteem". Kingston University. Archived from the original on 2010-02-18. Retrieved 2010-02-18. His official page at the Kingston University: "54. European Conrad Schlumberger Award 1987 for computational geophysics"
4. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=les+hatton Les Hatton's publications in Google Scholar
5. Les Hatton's publications indexed by the DBLP Bibliography Server at the University of Trier
6. Hatton, L. (2009). "Power-Law Distributions of Component Size in General Software Systems". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 35 (4): 566–572. doi:10.1109/TSE.2008.105.
7. Pfleeger, S. L.; Hatton, L. (1997). "Investigating the influence of formal methods". Computer 30 (2): 33. doi:10.1109/2.566148.
8. Hatton, L. (1998). "Does OO sync with how we think?". IEEE Software 15 (3): 46–54. doi:10.1109/52.676735.
9. Hatton, L. (1997). "Reexamining the fault density component size connection". IEEE Software 14 (2): 89–97. doi:10.1109/52.582978.
10. Ince, D. C.; Hatton, L.; Graham-Cumming, J. (2012). "The case for open computer programs". Nature 482 (7386): 485–488. doi:10.1038/nature10836. PMID 22358837.
11. Hatton, L. (1997). "The T experiments: Errors in scientific software". IEEE Computational Science and Engineering 4 (2): 27–38. doi:10.1109/99.609829.
12. Hatton, Les (1995). Safer C: developing software for high-integrity and safety- critical systems. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-707640-0.
13. Hatton, Les (2011). Email Forensics: Eliminating Spam, Scams and Phishing. BlueSpear Publishing. p. 350. ISBN 1908422009.
14. Oakwood Computing Associates Ltd. (Managing director)