BUSINESS
Irish Linux pioneer dies
08-11-2002
by
Dr John O'Gorman of the University of Limerick, the author of a number of works on programming and computer science, died this week in Limerick.
In high-tech and computing circles, Dr O'Gorman will be best remembered for his February 2001 book Operating Systems with Linux and his substantial body of work in the Linux and computing fields. Dr O'Gorman will be sadly missed.
There will be a special mass next week in memory of students and staff members from the University of Limerick who died during the year. The memorial mass will take place in the Salesian Church on Sunday 10 November at 7:30pm.
Dr O'Gorman received a Licence in Theology from the University of St Thomas, Rome, in 1970 and later earned a HDip in Education from NUI Maynooth in 1978. He became a Master of Science in Computer Systems in 1986, and in 1991 Dr O'Gorman earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Limerick.
Over the course of his life he carried out extensive research in the area of decompilation, investigating the possibility of recreating original source code from an executable image. Dr O'Gorman also pioneered the approach of describing the structure of such images by means of grammars, using these grammars to parse executable code into recognisable blocks and recreate the high-level element corresponding to each block.
The technologies developed in his work led to investigations into such diverse areas as software fingerprinting, direct translation from one binary format to another, manually maintaining executable code and the software/hardware interface.
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