Byron Cook

Byron Cook is a Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL) and Vice President & Distinguished Scientist at Amazon/AWS. His work bridges formal methods, automated reasoning, and program verification in domains spanning GenAI, distributed systems, hardware, operating systems, and biological systems.

• Academic Roles: UCL Professor (since 2014), Microsoft Researcher (2004-2014)
• Industry Leadership: Amazon (2018-present), Microsoft (1999-2014)

Research Interests focus on theoretical computer science with applications in:

• Program Termination Proving (TERMINATOR/T2 tools)
• Memory Safety (SLAyer project)
• Biological Systems Modeling (Bio Model Analyzer)
• Cloud Security (AWS Access Analyzer, Tiros)
• Formal Verification of Windows device drivers (Static Driver Verifier)

Scientific Contributions include groundbreaking work on automated termination proofs, shape analysis, and access policy verification. His 15 recent publications (2016-2023) demonstrate sustained impact in formal verification of AWS systems, biological modeling, and distributed SMT solving.

• PhD Students Advised: Alexey Gotsman, Eric Koskinen
• Current PhD Student: Kaustubh Nimkar

Awards:

• Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng)