James McDonald

Mr James McDonald has over 35 years of experience designing, developing, and maintaining large software systems.

At Stanford University, he worked on MetaDendral, a program for scientific theory formation; VALID and EXCHECK, CAI programs that were the instructors for Stanford’s introductory logic and set theory courses; and implemented Standard Lisp for IBM VM/CMS.

A founder of Lucid, Inc., he wrote major portions of Lucid Common Lisp, including the assembler, I/O, interrupt, and debugger modules, and parts of the compiler; and managed technology transfer to over 30 distinct OEM platforms, including parallel processors.

While working at Lucid, he entered the Stanford PhD Program in CS/AI. After completing all required coursework, he left to work full time at Kestrel.

At Kestrel Institute, he worked on automatic derivation of refinements in KIDS, then designed and implemented the first version of Specware, Kestrel’s core specification and refinement tool. He has participated in the design and implementation of all subsequent versions of Specware, and has implemented two extensions: one, called Accord, which models program states and transitions as specifications and morphisms; and one which introduces the notion of parallel or diverse refinements. He also designed and implemented JFlaws, a tool for detecting subtle feature-interaction vulnerabilities in Java applications, and helped implement a JavaCard Runtime Environment.