Cranfield University

Dr Shaun Forth

Senior Lecturer
Location: MH121b
E: s.a.forth@cranfield.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)1793 785311
Informatics and Systems Engineering

Current activities

Shaun Forth is Senior Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing. 

Shaun has an international research reputation in the field of Automatic/Algorithmic Differentiation, the differentiation of functions specified by computer programs.

• Since 2001 he has developed the MAD package for automatic differentiation of computer programs written in the Matlab programming language. MAD has featured in many publications and is commercially licensed by the University for distribution by the TOMLAB company; see http://tomopt.com/tomlab/products/mad/ for details.
• Is co-organiser of the twice yearly European Workshops on Automatic Differentiation and is Proceedings Editor and for the 6th International Conference on Automatic Differentiation.

Shaun has commercialised ProSAir, Cranfield University's Cartesian Mesh flow solver specialised for assessing blast loads on structures. ProSAir is available for both Commercial and Academic use and is a successor to the Air3D research code. For more details see the ProSAir homepage.

Working with Visiting Professor John Reid, Shaun runs a suite of Fortran programming courses which are well attended by delegates from the civilian and defence sectors.

Clients

Background

Shaun started his research career as an applied mathematician and was awarded his PhD, concerned with morphological and hydrodynamic instabilities in binary alloy solidification, by Bristol University in 1990.

He then spent 5 years at BAE Systems’ Sowerby Research Centre developing computational fluid dynamics algorithms and software for transonic and supersonic aerodynamics with an emphasis on methods for shocks and adaptive meshing

In 1994 he joined Cranfield University as a lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the Shrivenham campus. Since then, has built up an international research reputation in the field of Automatic Differentiation. This has involved both developing new computer packages for differentiating programs written in Fortran and Matlab, and also applying automatic differentiation techniques to computational fluid dynamics solvers for industrial partners such as: QinetiQ, BAE Systems Ltd, Airbus UK. Shaun, Emmanuel Tadjouddine, John Pryce and John Reid, were the first to implement the vertex elimination algorithm for automatic differentiation using compiler-like source transformation methods and demonstrated that such an approach could greatly improve the efficiency of automatically generated code for calculating Jacobians

Between 1998 and 2006 Shaun was involved in the development of the research codes Air3D and Air3Dfft, which are well known in the blast loading and hazard assessment community. This work was performed in conjunction with civil engineers and former colleagues Dr Peter Smith and Dr Tim Rose.

Selected publications

2010: 'A sparse matrix approach to reverse mode automatic differentiation in Matlab', Procedia Computer Science, Vol 1, No. 1, Conference on Computational Science ICCS 2010 ,pp 1857-1865, May 2010 , [with Naveen Sharma], http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2010.04.208 , https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/4356 (authors' copy)

2008: 'Robust Aircraft Conceptual Design Using Automatic Differentiation in Matlab' in 'Advances in Automatic Differentiation', Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, 64, 271-280, [with Mattia Padulu and Marin Guenov] http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68942-3_24 , https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/3130 (authors' copy).

2006: ‘An efficient overloaded implementation of forward mode automatic differentiation in MATLAB’, ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 32(2), 195-222, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1141885.1141888

2005: ‘Simplifying multivariate second-order response surfaces by fitting constrained models using automatic differentiation’, Technometrics, 47(3), 249-259, [with Trevor Ringrose] http://dx.doi.org/10.1198/004017005000000148

2005: ‘Using AD to solve BVPs in MATLAB’, ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 31(1), 79-94, [with Lawrence Shampine and Robert Ketzscher] http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1055531.1055535

2004: ‘Jacobian code generated by source transformation and vertex elimination can be as efficient as hand-coding’, ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 30(3), 266-299, [with Mohamed Tadjouddine, John Pryce and John Reid] http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1024074.1024076 

1992: 'Coupled convective and morphological instability in a simple model of the solidification of a binary alloy, including a shear flow', Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 236, 61-94 [with Adam Wheeler] http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022112092001344

1989: 'Hydrodynamic and morphological stability of the unidirectional solidification of a freezing binary alloy: a simple model', Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 202, 339-366 [with Adam Wheeler] http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022112089001217

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