Dr. Bruce Watson


About me

I’m an expert in performance-oriented computing (pattern matching, indexing, compilers, ...), an optimistic futurist, an enthusiastic high-performance motorcyclist, a precision pilot, a well-worn traveller, and a keen cultural/political pundit.

If you’re interested in my reading lists, see below or find me on Amazon lists.

What am I doing nowadays?

I’m into some exciting new kinds of technical work...largely related to parallel (multi-core) computing, algorithmics, reconfigurable computing and chip-design, though much of it remains confidential. I founded FST Labs (www.fst-labs.com), which develops and owns several high-performance finite state technologies for applications such as network security, bio-informatics, chip design (EDA), computational linguistics, etc. I’m co-Godfather (with Prof.Dr. Derrick Kourie) of the FASTAR research group (www.fastar.org), which spans the University of Pretoria’s computer science department and a few people at the Eindhoven University of Technology. In addition, Derrick and I co-lead ESPRESSO (www.espresso-soft.org), a group focused on taxonomies and toolkits of algorithms, domain-specific languages, virtual machines, formal methods, and more.

Take a tour of South Africa!

As many of you know, my family’s originally from South Africa and we regularly visit there. My parents are still very active in organizing and running small tours of the country, with a focus on interesting towns, beautiful scenery, wildlife, the history, wines, and more. There are also more theme-oriented possibilities, such as tennis tournaments, local art, golf, etc. If you’re interested, see them at www.watson-tours.com or email them at tours@watson-tours.com.

Lyn Watson’s art

My mother is an artist living in Western Canada. You can find some of her works here, and also email her at lyn@watson-tours.com.

Mervin Watson’s tennis

My father is a top-tier international tennis player (top-50 worldwide in his age-group), frequently on the Tennis Canada teams to ITF tournaments. Here are some photos.

What you should’ve read or seen!

Some of you know that maintain my own reading lists of books I think everyone should be reading. To make them more accessible, I’ve converted to Excel spreadsheets (exported from my Delicious Library) and updated/split them into a few categories:

  1. 1.general reading,

  2. 2.popular science,

  3. 3.heavy technical,

  4. 4.light technical and management,

  5. 5.for pilots, and finally,

  6. 6.movies and TV shows

Contacting me

You can email me: bw@bruce-watson.com or telephone me in Palo Alto (California): +1-650-488-4916.