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Thomas (Tom) Ball is a co-founder of the influential SLAM software model-checking project and creation of the Static Driver Verifier tool for finding defects in Windows device drivers. Tom is a 2011 ACM Fellow for ‘contributions to software analysis and defect detection’. As a manager at Microsoft Research, he nurtured research areas such as automated theorem proving, program testing/verification and empirical software engineering, and their application to industrial scale software engineering problems. Since 2015, he worked to bring the BBC micro:bit to market (more than 12 million worldwide to date), establish the Microsoft MakeCode platform to support CS education efforts, and created Jacdac, a new plug-and-play system for microcontrollers. He currently works on micro:bit apps, which provide new ways to use the micro:bit inside and outside the classroom, with colleagues at Lancaster University. He is a founding member of the Micro:bit Innovation and Research Lab.
Tom received his Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1993 and was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs from 1993 to 1999. From 1999 to 2025, he was a researcher/manager at Microsoft Research. Since retiring from Microsoft in early 2025, he is an Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington and an Honorary Professor at Lancaster University (UK).
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