Professor Mark Harman will be a keynote speaker at the Genetic Evolutionary Computation Conference 2013 (GECCO) in July 2013 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

David Clark and Earl Barr join GCHQ/EPSRC Research Institute on Automated Program Analysis and Verification of computer software.

David Clark and Earl Barr have been awarded £309K by GCHQ and the EPSRC as part of a £554K award held jointly with the University of Kent  to research fast "triage" of malware programs.  This award carries with it membership of the research institute.

The current flood of malware samples is predicted to grow into a deluge. This makes the problem of maintaining a database of malware signatures ever more difficult as each new sample must be analysed to determine the threat it poses. The more closely automated methods of matching malware stick to syntax the more vulnerable they are to obfuscation preventing correct classification. The challenge is to determine the behaviours (or semantics) of the malware at a level of abstraction that ignores obfuscation. However speed is paramount and the need for speed can't be ignored for the classification algorithm itself. This is why the proposal was originally named "Fast and Fuzzy".

Professor Mark Harman has been invited to give the keynote at the 4th International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WeTSOM 2013). The workshop will be held in conjunction with ICSE 2013 in San Francisco, USA in May 2013.