The Strachey Lectures in Computing Science

The Strachey Lectures are a series of termly computer science lectures named after Christopher Strachey, the first Professor of Computation at the University of Oxford.

In 1965, Christopher Strachey became the first leader of the Programming Research Group (PRG) at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (which later became the Department of Computer Science). He was the first Professor of Computation at Oxford, succeeded by Sir Tony Hoare in 1977 after his untimely death. With Dana Scott he founded the field of denotational semantics, providing a firm mathematical foundation for programming languages.

The Strachey lectures began in 1995 and have included many distinguished speakers and experts over the years, discussing topics of computer science. The Strachey Lectures are generously supported by OxFORD Asset Management.

Watch the latest Strachey Lectures here:

Find recordings of the whole series here:

https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/strachey-lectures

Find details about all the past lectures here:

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/strachey/previous.html

Previous lectures

• 19Nov2024
  Strachey Lecture: From probabilistic bisimulation to representation learning via metrics - Professor Prakash Panangaden

  15:00 Tuesday 19th November ( week 6, Michaelmas Term 2024 ) in Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PW

  Professor Prakash Panangaden ( McGill University )
• 30Apr2024
  TT24 Strachey Lecture - Professor Tim Roughgarden

  15:00 30th April ( week 2, Trinity Term 2024 ) in Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PW

  Professor Tim Roughgarden ( Columbia University, US )
• 6Feb2024
  Strachey Lecture: Professor Christel Baier

  15:00 6th February ( week 4, Hilary Term 2024 ) in Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PW

  Professor Christel Baier ( TU Dresden )
• 7Nov2023
  Strachey lecture: How Can Algorithms Help to Protect our Privacy - Professor Monika Henzinger

  15:00 Tuesday 7th November ( week 5, Michaelmas Term 2023 ) in Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PW

  Professor Monika Henzinger ( University of Vienna )
• 2May2023
  Strachey lecture: Use or be Used: Regaining Control of AI

  15:00 Tuesday 2nd May ( week 2, Trinity Term 2023 ) in The Museum of Natural History Lecture Theatre, Oxford University Museum of Natural History Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PW

  Professor Neil Lawrence ( University of Cambridge )
• 7Feb2023
  Strachey lecture: Symmetry and Similarity

  15:00 Tuesday 7th February ( week 4, Hilary Term 2023 ) in The Museum of Natural History Lecture Theatre, Oxford University Museum of Natural History Parks Rd, Oxford, OX1 3PW

  Professor Martin Grohe ( University of Aachen )
• 18Oct2022
  STRACHEY LECTURE: Integrating Logic, Probability and Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning using Probabilistic Soft Logic

  15:00 Tuesday 18th October ( week 2, Michaelmas Term 2022 ) in The Museum of Natural History Lecture Theatre, Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PW

  Professor Lise Getoor ( University of California, Santa Cruz. )
• 22Feb2022
  Strachey Lecture - How Are New Technologies Changing What We See?

  14:00 Tuesday 22nd February ( week 6, Hilary Term 2022 ) in Lecture Theatre 1, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Andrew Wiles Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG

  Professor Yvonne Rogers ( University College London )
• 2Nov2021
  Strachey Lecture - Mixed Signals: audio and wearable data analysis for health diagnostics

  14:00 Tuesday 2nd November ( week 4, Michaelmas Term 2021 ) in Via MS Teams

  Professor Cecilia Mascolo ( University of Cambridge )
• 1Jun2021
  The Quest for Truth in the Information Age

  14:00 Tuesday 1st June ( week 6, Trinity Term 2021 ) in Online via MS Teams

  Professor Sonja Smets ( University of Amsterdam )
• 9Mar2021
  Getting AI Agents to Interact and Collaborate with Us on Our Terms

  17:00 Tuesday 9th March ( week 8, Hilary Term 2021 ) in Online via MS Teams

  Professor Subbarao Kambhampati ( Arizona State University )
• 1Dec2020
  How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time

  16:00 Tuesday 1st December ( week 8, Michaelmas Term 2020 ) in Online

  Matt Ridley
• 3Mar2020
  Strachey Lecture - Formal methods reinvented - now with users, data, and inference

  14:00 Tuesday 3rd March ( week 7, Hilary Term 2020 ) in Lecture Theatre B, Department of Computer Science, The Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QD

  Professor Muffy Calder ( University of Glasgow )
• 19Nov2019
  Strachey Lecture - The Windmills of Your Mind: Reflections of a career in computer science research

  14:00 19th November ( week 6, Michaelmas Term 2019 ) in Lecture Theatre 1, Mathematical Institute University of Oxford, Radcliffe Observatory, Andrew Wiles Building, Woodstock Rd Oxford OX2 6GG

  Dame Wendy Hall ( University of Southampton )
• 18Jun2019
  Strachey Lecture - Can one Define Intelligence as a Computational Phenomenon?

  15:00 Tuesday 18th June ( week 8, Trinity Term 2019 ) in Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, St Giles', Oxford OX1 3LB

  Professor Leslie Valiant ( Harvard University )
• 20Feb2019
  Strachey Lecture - Doing for our robots what evolution did for us

  15:00 Wednesday 20th February ( week 6, Hilary Term 2019 ) in Mathematical Institute Andrew Wiles Building Radcliffe Observatory Quarter Woodstock Rd Oxford OX2 6GG

  Professor Leslie Kaelbling (MIT) ( MIT )
• 21Nov2018
  Strachey Lecture - Steps Towards Super Intelligence

  14:30 Wednesday 21st November ( week 7, Michaelmas Term 2018 ) in Mathematical Institute Andrew Wiles Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter Woodstock Rd Oxford OX2 6GG

  Professor Rodney Brooks ( MIT )
• 10Jul2018
  Strachey Lecture, in cooperation with the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC)

  17:00 10th July ( Trinity Term 2018 ) in The Sheldonian Theatre, Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3AZ

  Professor Stuart Russell ( University of California )
• 6Mar2018
  Strachey Lecture - Privacy-preserving analytics in, or out of, the cloud

  14:30 Tuesday 6th March ( week 8, Hilary Term 2018 ) in Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre, Saïd Business School, Park End St, Oxford OX1 1HP

  Professor Jon Crowcroft ( University of Cambridge )
• 21Nov2017
  Strachey Lecture - The Continuing Evolution of C++

  14:00 Tuesday 21st November ( week 7, Michaelmas Term 2017 ) in Lecture Theatre 1, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Andrew Wiles Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG

  Professor Bjarne Stroustup ( Morgan Stanley & Columbia University )
• 6Jun2017
  Strachey Lecture - Computer Agents that Interact Proficiently with People

  16:00 Tuesday 6th June ( week 7, Trinity Term 2017 ) in Lecture Theatre 2, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Andrew Wiles Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG

  Professor Sarit Kraus ( Bar-Ilan University & University of Maryland )
• 7Mar2017
  Strachey Lecture - Probabilistic machine learning: foundations and frontiers

  14:00 Tuesday 7th March ( week 8, Hilary Term 2017 ) in Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre, Saïd Business School, Park End Street, Oxford, OX1 1HP

  Professor Zoubin Ghahramani ( University of Cambridge )
• 31Oct2016
  Strachey Lecture - The Once and Future Turing

  18:00 Monday 31st October ( week 4, Michaelmas Term 2016 ) in The Sheldonian Theatre, Broad Street, Oxford

  Professor Andrew Hodges ( University of Oxford )
• 24May2016
  Quantum Supremacy

  14:00 Tuesday 24th May ( week 5, Trinity Term 2016 ) in Mathematical Institute (Lecture Theatre 1), University of Oxford, Andrew Wiles Building, Woodstock Road, Oxford, United Kingdom, OX2 6GG

  Dr Scott Aaronson ( MIT Austin )
• 24Feb2016
  Artificial Intelligence and the Future

  17:00 Tuesday 24th February ( Hilary Term 2016 ) in The Sheldonian Theatre, Broad Street, Oxford

  Dr Demis Hassabis
• 1Dec2015
  The World of Logic, Computation, and Agency

  14:00 Tuesday 1st December ( week 8, Michaelmas Term 2015 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Johan van Benthem ( Professor of Logic, Amsterdam and Stanford University )
• 19May2015
  From Denotational Semantics to Facebook Engineering

  14:00 Tuesday 19th May ( week 4, Trinity Term 2015 ) in Lecture Theatre B, E-Science Building, 7 Keble Road

  Professor Peter O'Hearn ( Engineering Manager at Facebook and Professor of Computer Science, University College, London )
• 10Mar2015
  Modern Organ Exchanges:Generalized Matching under Dynamics, Edge Failures, and Fairness

  14:00 Tuesday 10th March ( week 8, Hilary Term 2015 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Tuomas Sandholm ( Professor, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University )
• 18Nov2014
  Brute Force and Insight: Dealing with a Web of Data

  14:00 Tuesday 18th November ( week 6, Michaelmas Term 2014 ) in Lecture Theatre B, E-Science Building, 7 Keble Road

  Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt FREng FBCS ( University of Southampton )
• 27May2014
  Probability, Recursion, and the Computation of Least Fixed Points

  14:00 Tuesday 27th May ( week 5, Trinity Term 2014 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor Mihalis Yannakakis ( Columbia University )
• 11Feb2014
  From DNA sequences to cell lineage trees: Helping cell biology climb the data-structures ladder

  14:00 Tuesday 11th February ( week 4, Hilary Term 2014 ) in Lecture Theatre A, Wolfson Building

  Professor Ehud Shapiro ( Weizmann Institute of Science )
• 7May2013
  Theoretical Computer Science: on the Cusp of Interdisciplinarity

  16:30 Tuesday 7th May ( week 3, Trinity Term 2013 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor Andrew C. Yao ( Director, Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, Tsinghua University )
• 29Jan2013
  Concurrent Data Representation Synthesis

  16:30 29th January ( week 3, Hilary Term 2013 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor Mooly (Shmuel) Sagiv ( School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University )
• 16Oct2012
  Computational Insights and the Theory of Evolution

  16:30 Tuesday 16th October ( week 2, Michaelmas Term 2012 ) in Lecture Theatre A

  Professor Christos Papadimitriou ( C. Lester Hogan Professor of EECS at University of California at Berkeley )
• 1May2012
  PROGRAMS = DATA = FIRST-CLASS CITIZENS IN A COMPUTATIONAL WORLD

  16:30 Tuesday 1st May ( week 2, Trinity Term 2012 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor Neil D Jones and Jakob Grue Simonsen ( Department of Computer Science (DIKU) University of Copenhagen, Denmark )
• 6Mar2012
  Computer Augmented Program Engineering

  16:30 Tuesday 6th March ( week 8, Hilary Term 2012 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor Rajeev Alur ( University of Pennsylvania )
• 8Dec2011
  Mysteries of Search Trees

  16:30 Thursday 8th December ( week 9, Michaelmas Term 2011 ) in Lecture Theatre B, E-Science Building, 7 Keble Road, Oxford

  Professor Robert E. Tarjan ( Princeton University and HP Labs )
• 10May2011
  The Impact of Scale

  16:30 Tuesday 10th May ( week 2, Trinity Term 2011 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Dr Linda Northrop ( Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University )
• 22Feb2011
  10 Open Challenges in Software Engineering

  16:30 Tuesday 22nd February ( week 6, Hilary Term 2011 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor Anthony Finkelstein ( University College London )
• 16Nov2010
  Making stochastic process algebras count: modelling collective dynamics

  16:30 Tuesday 16th November ( week 6, Michaelmas Term 2010 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor Jane Hillston ( University of Edinburgh )
• 11May2010
  The 2-valued and the 3-Valued Abstraction-Refinement Frameworks in Model Checking

  16:30 Tuesday 11th May ( week 3, Trinity Term 2010 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor O Grumberg ( TECHNION, Israel Institute of Technology )
• 2Feb2010
  Abstractions for reasoning about concurrency

  16:30 Tuesday 2nd February ( week 3, Hilary Term 2010 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor C B Jones ( Newcastle University )
• 27Oct2009
  Classes, Jim, but not as we know them

  16:30 Tuesday 27th October ( week 3, Michaelmas Term 2009 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor Simon Peyton-Jones ( Microsoft Research Cambridge )
• 12May2009
  Model Checking - My 27-year Quest to Overcome the State Explosion Problem

  16:30 Tuesday 12th May ( week 3, Trinity Term 2009 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor Edmund M. Clarke ( FORE Systems University Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University )
• 10Feb2009
  Third Generation Machine Intelligence

  16:30 Tuesday 10th February ( week 4, Hilary Term 2009 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Professor Christopher Bishop ( Chief Research Scientist at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. Also Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. )
• 14Oct2008
  Data-Intensive Scalable Computing: Taking Google-Style Computing Beyond Web Search

  16:30 Tuesday 14th October ( week 1, Michaelmas Term 2008 ) in Lecture Theatre B

  Randy Bryant ( Carnegie Mellon, School of Computer Science )
• 13May2008
  50 in 50

  16:15 Tuesday 13th May ( week 4, Trinity Term 2008 ) in Lecture Theatre A

  Dr Guy Steele and Dr Richard Gabriel ( Sun Microsystems & IBM Research )
• 15Jan2008
  Can Programming be Liberated, Period?

  16:30 Tuesday 15th January ( week 1, Hilary Term 2008 ) in Computing Laboratory Lecture Theatre

  Professor David Harel ( Dept. of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science )
• 30Oct2007
  The world is covariant: is it safe?

  16:30 Tuesday 30th October ( week 2, Michaelmas Term 2007 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Bertrand Meyer ( Software Engineering, ETH Zurich )
• 1May2007
  On Repairing Reasoning Reversals via Representational Refinements

  16:30 Tuesday 1st May ( week 2, Trinity Term 2007 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Alan Bundy ( School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh )
• 16Jan2007
  Defunctionalized Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages

  16:30 Tuesday 16th January ( week 2, Hilary Term 2007 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Olivier Danvy ( Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark )
• 17Oct2006
  Reliable Systems Engineering

  16:30 Tuesday 17th October ( week 2, Michaelmas Term 2006 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Thomas A Henzinger ( School of Computer & Communication Sciences, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland )
• 9May2006
  Toward a Grainless Semantics for Shared-Variable Concurrency

  16:30 Tuesday 9th May ( week 2, Trinity Term 2006 ) in Lecture Theatre

  John Reynolds ( Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University )
• 17Jan2006
  The Design of A Formal Property-Specification Language

  16:30 Tuesday 17th January ( week 2, Hilary Term 2006 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Moshe Y Vardi ( Rice University )
• 8Nov2005
  A Family of Mathematical Documents for Professional Software Documentation

  16:30 Tuesday 8th November ( week 2, Michaelmas Term 2005 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor David Parnas ( Software Quality Research Laboratory, University of Limerick )
• 26Apr2005
  The unreasonable effectiveness of logic

  16:30 Tuesday 26th April ( week 2, Trinity Term 2005 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Philip Wadler ( School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh )
• 18Jan2005
  Software Engineering Mathematics

  16:30 Tuesday 18th January ( week 2, Hilary Term 2005 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Jean-Raymond Abrial ( Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich )
• 2Nov2004
  Uncertainty can be Better than Certainty: Some Algorithms for Primality Testing

  16:30 Tuesday 2nd November ( week 2, Michaelmas Term 2004 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Richard Brent ( University of Oxford )
• 27Apr2004
  The Limits of Software

  16:30 Tuesday 27th April ( week 2, Trinity Term 2004 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Grady Booch ( IBM Fellow )
• 20Jan2004
  Automated Reasoning and Formal Verification

  16:30 Tuesday 20th January ( week 2, Hilary Term 2004 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Mike Gordon ( University of Cambridge )
• 14Oct2003
  Curated Databases

  16:30 Tuesday 14th October ( week 2, Michaelmas Term 2003 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Dr Peter Buneman ( University of Edinburgh )
• 29Apr2003
  The Interior-Point Revolution in Constrained Optimization: History, Recent Developments, and Lasting Consequences

  16:30 Tuesday 29th April ( week 2, Trinity Term 2003 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Margaret H Wright ( Silver Professor of Computer Science and chair of the Computer Science Department, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University )
• 21Jan2003
  The Challenge of e-Science

  16:30 Tuesday 21st January ( week 2, Hilary Term 2003 ) in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Tony Hey ( Director of the UK e-Science Core Programme, EPSRC )
• 15Oct2002
  Hyper-Encryption and Ever Lasting Secrets

  16:30 Tuesday 15th October 2002 in Lecture Theatre

  Michael Rabin ( Harvard University )
• 23Apr2002
  Spatial Logics for Distributed Systems

  16:30 Tuesday 23rd April 2002 in Lecture Theatre

  Luca Cardelli ( Microsoft Research, Cambridge )
• 22Jan2002
  Towards the verifying compiler

  16:30 Tuesday 22nd January 2002 in Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, Clarendon Laboratory

  Professor Sir Tony Hoare FRS ( Microsoft Research, Cambridge )
• 9Oct2001
  Bigraphical Reactive Systems

  16:30 Tuesday 9th October 2001 in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Robin Milner ( University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory )
• 24Apr2001
  My Recollections of Operating System Design

  16:30 Tuesday 24th April 2001 in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Edsger W Dijkstra ( University of Texas at Austin )
• 16Jan2001
  Structured Programming and Literate Programming

  16:30 Tuesday 16th January 2001 in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Don Knuth ( Stanford University )
• 10Oct2000
  Contention Resolution

  16:30 Tuesday 10th October 2000 in Lecture Theatre

  Prof Mike Paterson ( University of Warwick )
• 2May2000
  How to write a proof

  16:30 Tuesday 2nd May 2000 in Lecture Theatre

  Leslie Lamport ( Compaq Systems Research Center )
• 25Jan2000
  The Challenge of Optimality in Program Specialisation

  16:00 Tuesday 25th January 2000 in Lecture Theatre

  Prof John Hughes ( Chalmers University of Technology )
• 12Oct1999
  From Computation to Interaction: towards a science of information

  16:30 Tuesday 12th October 1999 in Lecture Theatre

  Samson Abramsky ( University of Edinburgh )
• 27Apr1999
  Computation as a Tool for Understanding Genomes

  16:30 Tuesday 27th April 1999 in Lecture Theatre

  Richard M Karp ( University of Washington )
• 19Jan1999
  The Praxis of Software Engineering

  16:30 Tuesday 19th January 1999 in Lecture Theatre

  Martyn Thomas
• 13Oct1998
  Computer Systems Research: Past and Future

  16:30 Tuesday 13th October 1998 in Lecture Theatre

  Butler W Lampson ( Architect, Microsoft Corporation )
• 5May1998
  WW II Codebreaking with the Bombe and Colossus

  16:30 Tuesday 5th May 1998 in Lecture Theatre

  Anthony E Sale, Hon FBCS ( Museums Director, Bletchley Park )
• 24Feb1998
  Prooflets: A general paradigm for auto-certifiable mobile code and its implementation in the Coq Proof Assistant

  17:00 Tuesday 24th February 1998 in Lecture Theatre

  Gérard Huet ( INRIA )
• 14Oct1997
  Hints on Programming Language Design

  17:00 Tuesday 14th October 1997 in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Niklaus Wirth ( ETH, Zurich )
• 6May1997
  Where deduction meets exploration

  17:00 Tuesday 6th May 1997 in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Amir Pnueli ( Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel )
• 28Jan1997
  Re-inventing the Computer

  17:00 Tuesday 28th January 1997 in Lecture Theatre

  Professor David May ( University of Bristol )
• 22Oct1996
  Powerlist: A Structure for Parallel Recursion

  17:00 Tuesday 22nd October 1996 in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Jay Misra ( University of Texas at Austin )
• 30Apr1996
  Denotational Semantics: an Unbalanced Perspective

  17:00 Tuesday 30th April 1996 in Lecture Theatre

  Professor Gordon Plotkin ( Department of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh )
• 23Jan1996
  The Network Computer

  17:00 Tuesday 23rd January 1996 in Lecture Theatre

  Dr Andy Hopper ( Reader in Computer Technology, University of Cambridge and Vice President Research, Olivetti )
• 3Oct1995
  Twenty-Five Years of Domain Theory

  17:00 Tuesday 3rd October 1995 in Lecture Theatre

  Dana S Scott ( Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Mathematical Logic and Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania )