About the presenter

Les Hatton has given many presentations, seminars and courses over the years. They are characterised by a unique combination of humour and experience and have invited many kind comments from delegates, such as that given below:-

'... The presenter is Dr. Les Hatton, whose keynote speech entitled "Testing and Errors: the avoidable and the unavoidable", was described by many of the 900 delegates at the well-known U.S. Software Testing Conference, STAR'96 in Orlando, as, "... the best of the conference.", according to SQE the conference organisers'

Having spent most of his working career in industry, Les Hatton is now an independent consultant in software reliability and part-time Professor of Software Reliability at the Computing Laboratory, University of Kent. He was formerly a visiting Professor of Geophysics at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. He holds a B.A. (1970) from King's College, Cambridge, an M.Sc. (1971) and Ph.D (1973) from the University of Manchester, all in mathematics, an A.L.C.M. (1980) in guitar from the London College of Music and an LL.M. (1999) in I.T law from the University of Strathclyde. He received a number of international prizes for geophysics in the 1970's and '80s culminating in the 1987 European Conrad Schlumberger prize for his work in computational geophysics.

Shortly afterwards, he became interested in software reliability, and changed careers to study the design of high-integrity and safety-critical systems on which he has been a keynote speaker at many software conferences around the world. He is the author of numerous technical papers and books and his 1995 book "Safer C" pioneered the use of safer subsets in critical embedded systems paving the way for important initiatives such as MISRA C.

The US Journal of Systems and Software was kind enough to vote him in the 'world's leading 15 scholars of systems and software engineering in 1999, 2000 and 2002.

At play.

At work.

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