Research interests

My main research interests originate in the use of temporal logics in system verification, but spread to cover many connected areas.

Fixpoint logics

A central area of my research for the last twenty years has been fixpoint logics, and particularly the modal mu-calculus. These provide a foundational logic for verification using the temporal logic paradigm, and also have a wealth of intrinsically interesting mathematical properties.

As a consequence of this interest, I have also become interested in fixpoints in general, which has led to some forays into (mostly quite elementary!) descriptive set theory.

True concurrency

A long-standing interest is theories and models of true concurrency, in which causality and the independence of parallel components are taken seriously.

Independence-friendly logic

In the last few years, I have been working on modal analogues of Hintikka's Independence-Friendly Logic. This was inspired by its intuitively obvious links with concurrency - an intuition which takes a while to pin down!

Natural language

I have always been interested in natural language, particularly phonology, and recently I have started to do a little real work in the area, something which I hope to continue and deepen.

Papers and preprints

Selected publications:

Here are a few recent and/or popular publications: Most of my papers and preprints are online, accompanied by a short description and notes about dependencies.

Slides from talks

My talks page has the slides from some of my seminar etc. talks. This material will be moved into the publications page, but is currently separate.