Ben Simner

Summary

Computer Scientist, Software Engineer based in Cambridge, UK.
Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge.
See my CV, my publications or contact me.

My Story

1996 I was born in a small town in the south east of England called Bury St Edmunds.
2014 I joined the University of York for my undergraduate degree.
2016 During my second year of undergrad in the summer I did an internship with the Computer Science department working for Mike Dodds (now at Galois), on Starling, an automated verification tool that used concurrent separation logic to automatically verify small C-like programs given some simple assertions.
2016 Then I got to work on Jonathon Green's https://greensdictofslang.com/ website, a catalogue of the history of English slang. Probably the largest and most comprehensive of its kind.
2017 Over summer I internshiped at Microsoft Research, Cambridge under Neil Toronto working on Project Yellow: an effort to bring richer datatypes (and lambdas!) to Microsoft Excel, with Simon Peyton-Jones and Andy Gordon. During that time we built fuzz testing tools to generate spreadsheets for regression (from Excel itself) testing of the in-house reference implementation of the Excel formula language, and along the way we discovered lots of fun things about Excel.
2018 I graduated from York with a Masters in Engineering in Computer Science (with distinction).
My masters thesis was on functional programming with Colin Runciman where we built a tool called Rufous for automatic benchmarking of purely-functional persistent data structures in Haskell.

At the end of 2018 I joined the Computer Lab at the University of Cambridge as a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Prof Peter M. Sewell working on multicore semantics: formally defining the specification of the concurrent behaviour of our multicore microprocessors, specifically the parts relied on by systems software (cache maintenance, virtual memory, exceptions), specifically for Arm.

My Ph.D. is part funded by an EPSRC Industrial CASE Studentship award, with contribution from Arm.

2022 Still working on my Ph.D.