About me
By way of introduction, I'm Dr. Giles Howard and I work in the software safety & functional safety space day-to-day as a safety engineer.
The driver behind creating this blog was a combination of the following factors:
- There's a number of really interesting developments going on in the software & functional safety space at the moment, and I wanted a place to share any insight I might have into these;
- I need to improve my technical communication to a wider (public) audience, which has atrophied somewhat since I finished my PhD and stopped regularly presenting at conferences, workshops, symposiums, etc;
- I'm also getting back into personal projects - writing code, building electronics - and wanted a place to share any write-ups I have from these sort of activities.
So, this blog is going to be a mix of the three areas above, as best as I can manage.
As a further explanation of my background, and why you might choose to listen to me, my background can be really roughly summarised as follows:
- I am a Computer Science graduate from the University of Southampton, where my undergraduate focus was really on software engineering, cyber security and artificial intelligence;
- I was fortunate to go on to do a PhD at the University of Southampton which sought to combine safety and security analysis through modification of Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis to include security analysis steps as well as involvement of Event-B (a formal method). This produced a few publications and I was part of a cohort of National Cyber Security Centre-sponsored PhD students which gave me some insight into the threats facing cyber-physical systems all the way up to national infrastructure level;
- I entered industry in 2018 where I've since worked as a safety engineer specialising in functional safety and the ecosystem of tools, techniques and approaches to achieve high-integrity software across domains. I would say my main skill is helping software engineering teams understand what needs to be done to meet the relevant functional & software safety standards;
- I'm also recognised as a Functional Safety Engineer in Safety Instrumented Systems by TÜV Rheinland.
My main interests and hobbies are tinkering, gaming and generally reading up on the latest developments.