Research Overview

Thomas (Tom) Ball is a co-founder of the influential SLAM software model checking project and creation of the Static Driver Verifier tool for finding defects in Windows device drivers. Tom is a 2011 ACM Fellow for ‘contributions to software analysis and defect detection’. As a manager at Microsoft Research, he nurtured research areas such as automated theorem proving, program testing/verification and empirical software engineering, and their application to industrial scale software engineering problems. Since 2015, he worked to bring the BBC micro:bit to market (more than 10 million worldwide to date) and establish the Microsoft MakeCode platform for supporting CS education efforts. Most recently, he worked on Jacdac, a new plug-and-play system for microcontrollers. His current project is MicroCode, a way to program micro:bits without a separate computer.