Gordon's research interests are in the principles of programming languages. His expertise lies in the theory of operational semantics and concurrency, and in its application to computer security and mobile computation. His Ph.D. dissertation written at the University of Cambridge was a winner in the British Distinguished Dissertations in Computer Science competition.
Nominal Calculi for Security and Mobility (NCSM): 6 hours.We are experiencing an explosive growth in the deployment of mobile, networked hardware devices, and in networked software applications. I will describe how techniques -equational reasoning, type systems, and modal logics- from the study of two process calculi can be applied to problems of security and mobility arising from this growth. The spi calculus, a variant of the pi calculus, supports the description and analysis of cryptographic protocols. The ambient calculus embodies a flexible model for describing and programming mobile hardware and software.