Eulogy in memory of Alan

Logics for security session, in memory of Alan Jeffrey, Thursday, 11 July 2024

37th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, Enschede, The Netherlands 

Thank you for this opportunity to remember Alan. 

His family are touched by CSF paying tribute in this manner. 

Alan was born in January 1967 and grew up in Glasgow.  He attended Hyndland Secondary School, leaving in 1983 for university at Edinburgh. He was only 16 but eager to get access to a computer lab and to crack on with computer science. 

At Edinburgh he worked with Robin Milner and at Oxford, for his DPhil, his advisor was Bill Roscoe. 

After his DPhil, he flourished in an academic career in Gothenburg, Brighton, and Chicago. A dozen year stint followed as Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs. Alan found research success as a theoretician, publishing eight papers at LICS, the premier venue for logic in computer science. He would have loved the papers in this session! 

His LinkedIn profile Alan Jeffrey describes himself as a “research engineer, interested in the application of tools and techniques from CS research to practical problems.” He joined Mozilla in 2015 as Staff Research Engineer on Servo, the first large project written in the Rust programming language. Highlights included his work on multi-core systems, and constrained devices such as VR and AR headsets. In his final role, Principal Software Engineer at Roblox, he has brought a type system to the Lua programming language, used to create games on their popular platform. 

Alan published in the security and privacy community for over two decades, since a couple of papers at CSFW in 2001 and 2002 on type systems for security. More recently he published on vulnerabilities from speculative evaluation, firewall policies, audit, and role-based access control at venues including IEEE Security and Privacy, and ESORICS. This year he has a publication on privacy-preserving telemetry.  

As a student, he was a team member of the the LaTeX document preparation system. With Metafont, he invented the blackboard bold font, a standard LaTeX feature seen often in theory papers. As Lindsey Kuper said this week, “we're going to be seeing reminders of him everywhere we look for a long, long time.” 

I’ve known Alan since our university days in Edinburgh. Later I had the chance to do research with him. He was incredibly smart and kind and humane. He had an intense forensic ability to find subtle bugs. For instance, he found a type unsoundness bug in a released version of Java, and joined the committee to fix it. When we examined a PhD together, he found a subtle bug that unfortunately unpicked the argument of half of the dissertation. 

Culturally, he had an amazing recall of music, TV and cinema. He instilled in me an interest in comic books, one of his passions. Working with Alan was a mind broadening experience. 

He leaves behind two daughters, Janine and Laura, whom he loved very much, and co-parented with Karen. 

Farewell Alan. We struggle to make sense of this, your early passing. You led an extraordinary adventure of a life, across great cities of Europe, and then to Chicago. You divided your career between academia, corporate research, and tech companies. Knowing you was one of the great friendships of my life – your humour, intelligence, hospitality, humanity, your dear fathering, you always made me want to raise my game.  

May your memory be a blessing.