Alan Burns is a Professor in Computer Science and the Head of the Computer Science Department at the University of York. His research activities have covered a number of aspects of real-time and safety critical systems including the assessment of languages for use in the real-time safety critical domain, distributed operating systems, the formal specification of scheduling algorithms and implementation strategies, and the design of dependable user interfaces to safety critical applications. His teaching activities include courses in Operating Systems, Scheduling and Real-time Systems. He has authored over 350 papers and reports and 8 books, including Real-time Systems and Programming… Languages (3rd Edition) and Concurrency in Ada (2nd Edition).