Philip Steven Winterbottom

Title: Philip Steven Winterbottom: Software Verification and Garbage Collection Inventor

Introduction

Philip Steven Winterbottom is an inventor associated with Gillette, New Jersey, whose work includes software verification and memory management. His listed portfolio comprises 4 patents, including inventions addressing event-driven software testing and garbage collection.

Latest Patents

“Method and Apparatus for Testing Event Driven Software” describes a technique that translates event-driven software source code into a model for a model checker. The model helps determine whether the software satisfies correctness properties specified by a user. The process is designed to extract and check the model directly from the program code, without requiring user intervention.

“Garbage Collection Without Fine-Grain Synchronization” presents a method for running a mutator, marker, and sweeper concurrently without fine-grain synchronization or atomic operations among them. The technique organizes garbage collection into epochs and uses object coloring to coordinate the threads. Its design maintains an invariant that prevents the mutator from seeing an object marked with the sweeper’s color.

Career Highlights

Winterbottom’s listed company affiliations include Lucent Technologies Inc. and AT&T Corp. His patent work reflects an interest in techniques that improve software reliability and support efficient concurrent memory management.

Collaborations

His listed coworkers include Lorenz Francis Huelsbergen and Kenneth Lane Thompson. Their names provide context for the professional network associated with Winterbottom’s work.

Conclusion

Philip Steven Winterbottom’s inventions address two important areas of computing: verifying event-driven software and coordinating concurrent garbage collection. Together, his listed patents illustrate a focus on practical methods for improving software correctness and system operation.