Adrian Johnstone, BSc, PhD Lond,
CEng, CITP, FBCS, MIEE

e-mail
Position	Academic Staff
Research Area	Compilers
Telephone	+44 1784 443425
Homepage	http://www.cs.rhul.ac.uk/home/adrian
Publications

Biography

Adrian Johnstone is Head of Department, and Reader in Computer Science. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Science from 1995 to 1998 and has been an elected member of the College's Council and Academic Board.

Dr Johnstone's current research interests lie in Theoretical Computer Science, particularly in language design and compiler theory. Recent work centres on the formal properties of, and applicability of, generalised parsing. There has been a resurgence of interest in general parsing techniques because modern computer hardware is sufficiently powerful to enable such techniques to be used. Together with Elizabeth Scott, Dr Johnstone has developed correct, efficient algorithms for parsing general context free languages, extending Tomita's epsilon-free algorithm to include epsilon rules and Aycock and Horspool's algorithm to grammars with hidden left recursion. He is presently investigating their application to computer language parsing; compiler code generation; reverse compilation and bioinformatics, as well as the traditional domain of natural language parsing.

Earlier research concerned the efficient design and implementation of realtime processors, especially fast image processing systems, at both board and chip level. Recently, we have begun working on custom processor specification based on new algorithms for finding convex subsets of dataflow graphs.

• Publications
• Research students:
  Dr Peter Hoare, Dr Andrew Waters, Dr Tim Womack, Dr Rob Economopoulos, Joe Reddington
• Research assistants:
  David Bull, Paul Roberts, Dr Mike Fletcher, Eric Bernesconi