Prof. Jade Alglave is a professor of Computer Science at UCL and a Senior Principal Engineer at Arm.

Together with Luc Maranget (Inria, France) she has developed a domain specific language called cat, which can be used to describe consistency models in a concise and formal manner.

Examples of models written in cat include the Armv8 model and the Linux model.

The cat language drives the herd+diy toolsuite, a collection of tools which:

1. Execute a consistency model written in cat in a way which determines whether certain states of litmus tests are reachable;
2. Generate systematic families of litmus tests which can be used to check hardware against a cat model
3. Run those tests on hardware

Prof. Alglave’s work has been recognised in various ways: Royal Society Brian Mercer Award for Innovation 2014, Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal 2018 and British Computing Society Roger Needham Award 2020.