Olexandr Konovalov
SSI fellow
University of St Andrews
My work
I am a lecturer in the School of Computer Science of the University of St Andrews, where I am leading the Research Software Group, focussed on interdisciplinary computational research and development of underpinning research software, training in scientific computing, and studies in research software aspects.
I am also a member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra and one of the developers of the open-source system GAP, which is used for research and teaching in the study of groups and their representations, rings, algebras, semigroups, combinatorial structures, and other discrete mathematical objects.
Before becoming a lecturer, for more than a decade I was actively involved in everyday aspects of GAP development, including release management, regression tests, liaising with package authors wishing to contribute their developments to GAP, as well as technical support and user training. I started to contribute to GAP in Ukraine, after completing PhD in pure mathematics at the Institute of Mathematics of NASU and looking for mathematical software to work with unit groups of modular group algebras, which were the topic of my dissertation. One source of my motivation to make GAP better came from using GAP in my own mathematical research – to search for examples and counterexamples, to automate routine calculations and to find arguments needed for proofs. This often required substantial computational resources and combining different tools, which has naturally led me into the area of parallel computations and interfaces design. In the past, I have been involved in the in the European project SCIEnce - Symbolic Computation Infrastructure for Europe, EPRSC-funded projects HPC-GAP and then in the CCP CoDiMa – Collaborative Computational Project in Computational Discrete Mathematics, and also in the Horizon 2020 project OpenDreamKit.
I am a member of the GAP Council and the GAP Support group, a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, and an Instructor and a Trainer for the Carpentries.
I am also an editor of several journals publishing on research software: the Journal of Open Source Software, the Journal of Open Research Software, and the Journal of Software for Algebra and Geometry.
ORCID: 0000-0001-5299-3292
Online Presence
Check out contributions by and mentions of Olexandr Konovalov on www.software.ac.uk