Scott West

Introduction

Hello! My name is Scott West, a PhD candidate from the beautiful province of Ontario, Canada. I previously attended McMaster University, obtaining both my bachelor and masters degrees there, in software engineering and computer science, respectively.

Research

My current research is supervised by Bertrand Meyer and focuses the correctness of concurrent programs. The general vehicle for this research is the SCOOP programming language, a modification of the existing Eiffel language. The goal is to make concurrent programming easier by bringing it closer to the sequential programming style. SCOOP does this by introducing the concept of separate objects. These are objects which may be running on a different processor, where a processor here is an abstraction for a unit of computation. A processor could be a thread, or if an implementation were available, a distributed node located half-way across the world.

Previous research, conducted under the supervision of Wolfram Kahl, focused on the creation of a graph transformation framework in Haskell. This framework was intended to be an extensible and have built-in ties to a visualization that was able to be directly manipulated. The high-level goal was to offer a way to rapidly prototype programs, based on graph transformation, with an easy-to-use interface.

Teaching

I have previously been a teaching assistant in four courses at McMaster University: twice for Principles of Programming, once for Software Design I, and once for Real-time Systems and Control Applications. At ETH Zürich I have been an assistant for the twice for Einführung in die Programmierung, and once for Concepts of Concurrent Computation.

Publications

2010

• Scott West, Sebastian Nanz, Bertrand Meyer: A Modular Scheme for Deadlock Prevention in an Object-Oriented Programming Model. ICFEM 2010, 2010. [pdf] [bibtex]
• Ganesh Ramanathan, Benjamin Morandi, Scott West, Sebastian Nanz, Bertrand Meyer: Deriving Concurrent Control Software from Behavioral Specifications. IROS 2010, 2010. [pdf] [bibtex]

2009

• Scott West, Wolfram Kahl: A Generic Graph Transformation, Visualisation, and Editing Framework in Haskell. 8th International Workshop on Graph Transformation and Visual Modeling Techniques, ECEASST vol. 18, 2009.