Prof. Bev Littlewood

Bev Littlewood's Photograph

Current Position:
Responsibility:
Research Interests:

Background: Bev Littlewood has degrees in mathematics and statistics, and a PhD in statistics and computer science; he is a Chartered Engineer, and a Chartered Statistician. He has worked for more than 30 years on problems associated with the dependability of software-based systems, and has published many papers in international journals and conference proceedings and has edited several books. His technical contributions have largely focused on the development of probabilistic and statistical techniques for software systems engineering. He has a long term interest in the question of how far these approaches can take us in providing assurance that systems are fit for purpose - in particular, whether certain critical systems are sufficiently safe to be allowed to operate. He has encouraged - and taken part in - debate about such issues in both technical and non-technical forums.

In 1983 he founded the Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) at City University, London, and was its Director from then until his (semi-)retirement in 2003. During this period CSR attracted many millions of pounds of research funding from various European and national agencies, and gained an international reputation for the quality of its research. He is currently Professor of Software Engineering at City University.

From 1990 to 2005 he was a member of the UK Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee, in which role he played a part in the extensive discussions, and controversy, concerning the first use of a software-based protection system for a UK power reactor. He is a member of IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Reliable Computing and Fault Tolerance, of the UK Computing Research Committee, and is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He is currently serving his second term as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and is on the editorial boards of several other international journals. In 2007 he was appointed to the IEEE John von Neumann Award Committee. He was the recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Harlan D Mills Award in 2007, the citation of which reads: "For leading research on the application of rigorous probabilistic and statistical techniques in software engineering, particularly in systems dependability".

Contact Details:

Tel: 020 7040 8420 (from UK), or +44 20 7040 8420 (outside UK)

Fax: 020 7040 8585 (from UK), or +44 20 7040 8585 (outside UK)

E-mail: b.littlewood@csr.city.ac.uk

Some recent publications

B Littlewood, D Wright, 'The Use of Multilegged Arguments to Increase Confidence in Safety Claims for Software-Based Systems: A Study Based on a BBN Analysis of an Idealized Example', IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 347-365, May, 2007.
RE Bloomfield, B Littlewood, D Wright, 'Confidence: Its Role in Dependability Cases for Risk Assessment', Proc International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2007), pp338-346, 2007.
P Bishop, I Gashi, B Littlewood, D Wright, 'Reliability Growth Modelling of a 1-Out-Of-2 System: Research with Diverse Off-The-Shelf SQL Database Servers', Proc International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE-2007), 2007: to appear.
B Littlewood, L Strigini, 'Redundancy and diversity in security', Proc ESORICS 2004, 9th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (Sophia Antipolis, France), Springer, pp423-438, 2004.
B Littlewood. P Popov, 'The effect of testing on the reliability of fault-tolerant software', Proc International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2004), pp265-274, 2004.
B. Littlewood, RE Bloomfield, 'Multi-legged arguments: the impact of diversity upon confidence in dependability arguments', Proc International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2003), pp25-34, 2003
B Littlewood, P Popov, L Strigini, 'Assessing the reliability of diverse fault-tolerant software-based systems', Safety Science, 40, pp781-796, 2002

Bev's full list of research papers and abstracts / full texts