Chris Seaton MEng (Bris)

I am a PhD student at the University of Manchester, where I am researching programming languages and irregular parallelism. In my spare time I develop an award winning medical app that is the first app regulated as a medical device in the UK, and run a consultancy to help others develop revolutionary medical software.

Between undergraduate and postgraduate study, I trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps of the British Army. I served for four years on operations and in training establishments, leaving at the rank of Captain.

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What do I do?

Computer Science

I am a PhD student at the University of Manchester, part of the Advanced Processor Technologies research group and under the supervision of Professor Ian Watson and Doctor Mikel Luján. My research interests are in programming languages and irregular parallelism, employing research including dataflow, transactional memory, and optimistic and speculative execution.

Simply put, I am trying to solve the problem of how to make software run in parallel when it is very hard to find any part of the program that can run independently of any other. See this video of me talking for some background.

Medical Software

I am also interested in how software can support the medical profession. In a small team with senior plastic surgeons I have developed a medical app, Mersey Burns for calculating fluids for burns patients all the way from idea to releasing on the app store, awards success, NHS funding and approval as the first regulated and CE marked medical app in the UK. There are multiple academic publications describing Mersey Burns, and I have been invited to talk to the industry about how we have achieved so much.

With my colleagues I now run a commercial consultancy, Medicapps Ltd, to pass on our unique experience and knowledge.

Awards and Prizes

  • Hele Shaw Prize, University of Bristol, 2007
  • Best Paper Award, MULTIPROG, 2012
  • Winner, NHS North West Innovations Awards, 2011
  • Highly Commended, eHealth Awards, 2012
  • Winner, Best Poster Award, Research Symposium, 2012

Projects

Katahdin

Katahdin was my master’s work at the University of Bristol. It is a research programming language where the syntax and semantics of the language are mutable at runtime. This allows for multiple languages to be implemented in a single runtime, and for different languages to be used in different parts of the same program, the same function, or even the same line. My research built on contemporary work on parsing expression grammars and packrat parsing.

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Mersey Burns

Mersey Burns is a free iPhone® app for doctors to calculate how much fluid to give to a burns patient, making a traditional pen-and-paper method faster and more accurate. It is the first app in the UK regulated and CE marked as a medical device.

  • Winner, NHS North West Innovations Awards, 2011
  • Highly Commended, eHealth Awards, 2012
Learn more

Publications, Presentations and Talks

My work on Google Scholar

Thesis

Formal Academic Publications

Journal Editorial

Invited Talk

Presentations

Posters