Matthew Alan Le Brun

About

I am a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, supervised by Ornela Dardha and Simon Fowler.

I am a member of the Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA) group, forming part of the Programming Languages Theme, and am Scotland'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.

Nowadays, my Ph.D. research spans the areas of Programming Languages, Behavioural Type Theory, Distributed and Concurrent Computation, Logic, and Fault-Tolerance.

Publications

Proceedings Papers

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

Talk Proposals

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

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.

Teaching Assistant

University of Glasgow: Programming Languages (H), 2023
Theory of Computation (H), 2023
University of Malta: Programming Paradigms, 2021
Formal Languages and Automata, 2020—2021

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.

Events

BehAPI Tutorial Day @ DisCoTec, June 2023 (Invited Participant)
Glasgow Science Festival, June 2023 (Science Communicator)
Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems (FORTE), June 2023 (Reviewer)
International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR), September 2022 (Reviewer)
Scottish Programming Languages and Verification Summer School (SPLV), July 2022 (Invited Participant)
Scottish Programming Languages Seminar (SPLS), July 2022 (Organiser)
Glasgow Science Festival, June 2022 (Science Communicator)
European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par), August 2021 (Reviewer)

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