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Manny Lehman

Manny has recently moved from Imperial College to the Software Forensics Centre at Middlesex University. He has a most distinguished worldwide reputation in the discipline of software engineering. A large proportion of his work has been in the area of software process, improvement and evolution.

Manny has had a distinguished career in software engineering including a mixture of industrial and academic appointments. He gained his PhD from Imperial College, working on the ICCE II computer. In 1956 he joined the Ferranti London Laboratories where he was responsible for a study feasibility of using the Mercury computer to control Blue Streak missile launch. A year later he joined the Scientific Department of the Israeli Ministry of Defence where he led a small team in the design and construction of the SABRAC digital computer. In 1964 he moved to IBM Research at Yorktown Heights, where he set up and led a team that architected the IMP parallel processing system. He then undertook a study of the IBM programming process. The study results were published in a report "The Programming Process" in 1969 and reprinted in "Program Evolution - Processes of Software Change in 1985.

He has spent the last 30 years at the Department of Computing at Imperial College. In 1980 he published a software classification scheme whose significance in software process design and improvement is now widely recognised. In 1988, he defined the 'Software Uncertainty Principle', based on the observation that embedded assumptions in E-type software tend to become invalid as the operational domain changes, leading to uncertainty in the outcome of any execution. From 1979 to 1984 he was Head of the Department of Computing at Imperial College, where he founded Imperial Software Technology Ltd (IST).

Manny is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the EPSRC College, ACM, BCS, IEE, and IEEE. In 2001 he received the Harlan D. Mills IEEE computing Science Award in recognition of his contributions to the software engineering field. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journals of Systems and Software, Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice and Software Process: Improvement and practice. A listing of his publications (and the texts of some of them) may be accessed via his homepage.