Biography

Jonathan P. Bowen

Emeritus Professor of Computing and Chairman of Museophile Limited

Jonathan Bowen, FBCS FRSA, is Chairman of Museophile Limited (founded in 2002), an Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University, where he was Professor of Computing, establishing and heading the Centre for Applied Formal Methods from 2000, From 2017, he has been an Adjunct Professor at Southwest University, Chongqing, China. Between 2013-15, he was Professor of Computer Science at Birmingham City University. During 2006–07, he was a visiting academic at University College London. Between 2007–09, he was a Visiting Professor at King's College, London, and during 2008–09, he was an Associate at Praxis High Integrity Systems (now Altran). From 2010, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Westminster. During 2010, he was a Visiting Professor at Waikato University in New Zealand and in 2012 he was a Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute in New York.

From 1995 to 2000, Bowen was a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, University of Reading where he led the Formal Methods and Software Engineering Group. During 1999, Bowen was a Visiting Research Fellow at the United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology (UNU/IIST), Macau. Previously he was a senior researcher at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory Programming Research, where he worked under the guidance of Sir Tony Hoare, FRS. Between 1979 and 1984, he worked at Imperial College, London as a research assistant, latterly in the interdepartmental Wolfson Microprocessor Laboratory.

He has been involved with the field of computing in both industry (including Marconi Instruments, Logica, Silicon Graphics Inc., and Altran Praxis) and academia since 1977. His interests have ranged from formal methods, safety-critical systems, the Z notation, provably correct systems, rapid prototyping using logic programming, decompilation, hardware compilation, software/hardware co-design, linking semantics, and software testing, to the history of computing, online museums, and virtual communities. He holds an MA degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University.

In 1994, Bowen won the IEE Charles Babbage Premium award. During 1993–97, he managed the ESPRIT ProCoS-WG Working Group of 25 European partners on Provably Correct Systems. He has produced around 400 publications, including over 30 books/proceedings, and has served on over a hundred programme committees. According to Google Scholar, he has around 15,000 citations and an h-index of 56. For many years, Bowen was Chairman of the Z User Group and a co-chair of the associated meetings and international conferences. He is also Chairman of the BCS-FACS Specialist Group on the Formal Aspects of Computing Science (first elected in 2002) and has been a member of the ACM and IEEE.

Bowen has been academic co-editor of Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering: A NASA Journal and an associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys. He has co-edited special issues of journals such as Formal Aspects of Computing and co-edited the proceedings of the EVA London conference series on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts since 2006, with a volume of selected revised papers appearing in 2013, published by Springer. In 2012, he co-organized a celebration of Alan Turing’s centenary, Turing’s Worlds, in Oxford. An associated co-authored book, The Turing Guide, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. He co-edited the book, Museums and Digital Culture, published by Springer in 2019. A book on The Arts and Computational Culture is due to be published by Springer in 2024. Bowen also contributes to Wikipedia.

In 2001, Bowen received the Freedom of The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, the 100th Livery Company in the City of London, later becoming a Liveryman. In 2002, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Bowen became a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2004 and is now a Life Fellow of both the BCS and RSA.

 

Jonathan Bowen