David Sinclair's research interests are in the design and verification of distributed multiprocessor systems.

Modern society has become reliant on software systems for many mission-critical and life-critical functions. One approach to verifying these software systems is to use formal mathematical logics, theorem provers and model checkers. Dr. Sinclair's work has used a variety of formalisms such as Mixed Intuitionistic Linear Logic (MILL) and variants of the p-calculus for the specification and verification of mission critical distributed systems as typified by communications and security protocols. As part of the Enterprise Ireland funded research project IMPROVE, Dr. Sinclair is currently working on the specification and verification of the family of protocols that can be found in modern Public Key Infrastructures.

In isolation, these formalisms will be of little practical value unless they are integrated into a design methodology that covers the complete development cycle from analysis, design, development and verification. These design methodologies have to be "designer-friendly". Dr. Sinclair has been involved in several national and international projects that address this and related issues. The goal of these projects is to develop object-oriented methodologies to aid a designer in bringing a design from initial requirements specification to a formal model.

In the area of web services, the Client-Server Matching project is investigating ways to provide a web-based framework to allow users to have universal access to web services from various access devices possibly via a series of intermediate services. This framework is dynamic and requires minimal configuration, but is still flexible enough to offer universal access as new applications/services and access devices are developed.

Dr. Sinclair also researches applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Strategic Games. Although significant advances have been made in computer Chess, there is still a long way to go in the development of "intelligent" search algorithms for computer games, particularly games of strategy. Dr. Sinclair's research analyses existing "expert" games to find recurrent partial patterns and their outcomes. When these partial positions re-occur, their associated outcomes are used to forward prune the search tree.