About Christopher
I am a Post-doc researcher developing (languages for) formal specifications of distributed systems. With my colleagues, I use formal methods and programming languages as tools to shape and understand complex cyber-social systems.
The specification process is useful, because it forces us to resolve ambiguities and inconsitencies in our ideas. The resulting specifications are useful, because they enable recording and communicating our ideas, and it lays the groundwork for automating difficult but important tasks, such as identifying (surprising) consequences and proving (emergent) properties.
Ultimately, most of my work aims to help solve practical problems. Lately, I have focused on two problems in particular: how can we (1) express and enforce the social norms regulating inter-origanisational processing of medical data, and (2) define and realise multi-party communication interactions in ad hoc network sessions?
Publications
Interests
- distributed systems (e.g., atop unreliable asynchronous networks)
- set-theoretic models and model-checking (e.g., in Alloy)
- functional models and and theorem proving (e.g., in Rocq)
- logic programming and search (e.g., in Clingo)
- imperative and systems programming (e.g., in Rust)
Education
PhD in Computer Science, 2025
Universiteit van Amsterdam
MSc Parallel & Distributed Computing Systems, 2020
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam