Michael Foster

I am currently a Research Software Engineer at the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. I work with various academics to develop high-quality research software. My own research interests lie in the testing of black-box software systems.

Before becoming an RSE, I was an RA working on the CITCoM project (PI Neil Walkinshaw's). The project aimed to apply Causal Inference techniques to address the challenges of testing computational models, specifically large input spaces, long runtimes, and nondeterminism.

I studied my PhD (2017-2020) at the University of Sheffield under John Derrick and Achim Brucker on the inference of extended finite state machine models from black-box software execution traces. This covered a number of areas including Model Inference, Genetic Programming, Theorem Proving, and Model Checking.