photo of me

Matthew Alan Le Brun

Ph.D. student at University of Glasgow

Member of CoLab ◦ Concurrency Lab

Glasgow's Ph.D. representative for SPLI

Email: m.le-brun.1 -at- research.gla.ac.uk


Recent

Started writing my thesis!

Appointed publicity co-chair for DisCoTec 2025/2026

MAGπ! accepted for publication at FORTE'24

About

I am a final year Ph.D. student in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, supervised by Ornela Dardha, Simon Fowler, and Paul Harvey.

My Ph.D. research spans the areas of Concurrency, Programming Languages, Behavioural Types, and Fault Tolerance. In essence, I explore type systems for message-passing programs that are prone to networking errors.

I am a member of the Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA) group, and the Programming Languages Theme. I am also Glasgow's Ph.D. student representative within SPLI.

Previously, I obtained my M.Sc. and B.Sc. from the University of Malta, supervised by Adrian Francalanza. My research focus was in distributed computing and consensus algorithms.

Publications

Proceedings Papers

MAGπ!: The Role of Replication in Typing Failure-Prone Communication
Matthew Alan Le Brun, Ornela Dardha
Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems (FORTE) 2024
MAGπ: Types for Failure-Prone Communication
Matthew Alan Le Brun, Ornela Dardha
European Symposium on Programming (ESOP) 2023
Graft: General Purpose Raft Consensus in Elixir
Matthew Alan Le Brun, Duncan Paul Attard, Adrian Francalanza
Erlang Workshop 2021

Talks and Extended Abstracts

Towards Session-Typed Consensus
Matthew Alan Le Brun, Ornela Dardha
30 Years of Session Types (ST30) @ SPLASH'23
MAGπ: Types for Failure-Prone Communication
Matthew Alan Le Brun, Ornela Dardha
Programming Language Approaches to Concurrency- & Communication-cEntric Software (PLACES) 2023

Theses

On Extending and Verifying the Raft Consensus Algorithm
Matthew Alan Le Brun
M.Sc. Dissertation 2021
On Implementing and Evaluating the Raft Distributed Consensus Algorithm
Matthew Alan Le Brun
B.Sc. Final Year Project 2020

Teaching

Lectures

Programming Languages (H)
University of Glasgow, 2024
Delivered two lectures of 2 hours each on the foundations of programming language implementation; one lecture discussed the approached of interpretation and compilation, the other was on approaches to parsing.
Theory of Computation (H)
University of Glasgow, 2023
Delivered two lectures of 2 hours each on the pi-calculus as a foundation for concurrent computation; one lecture focused on equivalence theories, the other on type systems.
Programming Paradigms
University of Malta, 2021
Delivered two lectures of 2 hours each on concurrent programming with asynchronous message passing. Lectures focused on the actor model and Erlang, with an in-depth look at fault-isolation and fault-tolerance.

Supervision

Since 2023, I have acted as primary supervisor for 1 MSc CS+ student, and 1 MSci (integrated masters) student.

Teaching Assistant

University of Glasgow
University of Malta

Funding

In 2023 I spent a month on secondment at Carnegie Mellon University, hosted by Frank Pfenning and Stephanie Balzer. During the time, we conducted an initial investigation of logical interpretations of session types for failure-prone message-passing systems.

This secondment was funded by the BehAPI project (awarding me €2,000), and University of Glasgow's College of Science and Engineering (awarding me £2,000 as a successful applicant of the mobility scholarship).

Open Source

Graft

I am the main developer and maintainer of Graft, a tool for building distributed and fault-tolerant replicated state machines. Graft allows users to build applications as a single state machine, and automates replication over a distributed consensus cluster. The consensus engine is my own implementation of Raft, which has been evaluated to be comparable in performance to state-of-the-art implementations, and has formal guarantees of correctness by means of runtime verification.

Education

Ph.D.
University of Glasgow, 2022—present
My Ph.D. is in Programming Languages, Behavioural Type Theory, Concurrent and Distributed Computation, and Fault Tolerance.
Master of Science
University of Malta, 2020—2022
My M.Sc. was a full time research degree in Distributed Computing, Consensus Algorithms, and Runtime Verification.
Bachelor of Science (Hons) (Computing Science)
University of Malta, 2017—2020
My B.Sc. focused on theoretical foundations of computation, programming languages, and distributed systems.

Employment

Software Engineer (Part Time)
CCBill EU, 2020—2021
Software Engineering Intern
CCBill EU, 2018—2020
© Matthew Alan Le Brun 2023