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Jifeng He at Oxford and Beyond: An Appreciation

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Theories of Programming and Formal Methods

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Abstract

This paper provides an overview of Jifeng He’s academic achievements while at Oxford University in the UK, and later in Macau and Shanghai, together with his legacy internationally. He was an important researcher on the European ESPRIT ProCoS projects and Working Group on “Provably Correct Systems”. Subsequently and most notably, this led to collaboration with Tony Hoare on Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP), resulting in a jointly authored book and later conference series on the subject. Jifeng returned to his native China in 1998, first at the United Nations University in Macau and then at the East China Normal University in Shanghai from 2005 to 2019. In recent years, Jifeng has been the founder of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) research institute, focusing on the application of AI technology in large-scale industrial software systems. His scientific contributions have been recognized through his election to membership of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This paper is structured in broadly chronological order, starting with a brief biography and then covering Jifeng He’s academic contributions successively in Oxford, Macau, and Shanghai. The paper concludes with an overall appreciation of his major achievements.

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Acknowledgements

Jonathan Bowen is grateful for financial support provided by Museophile Limited. The comments from the reviewers were very helpful in improving the final version of this paper. Influenced by [59], the number of references in this paper is also 80 to match Jifeng’s birthday. Finally, both authors are extremely grateful for many years of collaboration with Jifeng, more fully referenced elsewhere [4], and wish him a very happy 80th birthday.

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    Jonathan P. Bowen

  2. Software Engineering Institute, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Huibiao Zhu

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    Jonathan P. Bowen

  2. East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Qin Li

  3. University of Macau, Macau, China

    Qiwen Xu

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Bowen, J.P., Zhu, H. (2023). Jifeng He at Oxford and Beyond: An Appreciation. In: Bowen, J.P., Li, Q., Xu, Q. (eds) Theories of Programming and Formal Methods. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14080. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40436-8_1

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