Postgraduate research in
FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING
at the University of Glasgow
OK, you *could* do buzzword-compliant programming for company X on
their test harness for their test rig for the GTI (General Toaster
Interface). You'd make a good living. Ho hum.
Or you could come to Glasgow to create: Better Computing through
Functional Programming. We're looking both for hackers (ahem, er,
"system builders") and for people who like staring at blank sheets of
paper (uh, mmm, "theoreticians"), because we both want to chip away
at the problems that prevent FP from Taking Over The World *and*
really understand What's Going On Here. The FP fire tends to be where
theory and practice rub together.
Oh yes, you could get a PhD while you were at it. Studentships
are available.
This year we hope to attract three or four new research students
in the following general areas (but feel free to suggest your own!):
* John O'Donnell http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jtod
- Parallel algorithms expressed functionally.
- Formal reasoning about functional programs, including program
specification, derivation and transformation.
- Data parallel algorithms and architectures.
- Functional hardware description languages.
* Simon Peyton Jones http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~simonpj
- Functional-language implementation technology, based mainly around
the Glasgow Haskell Compiler: interpreters and compilers;
sequential and parallel hardware; storage management and garbage
collection; profilers.
Our parallel Haskell system, GUM, is now on alpha-release, but
there's a crying need to measure what happens, learn, tune
and improve.
- Language interfaces, libraries and extensions to make functional
programming more useful for real applications: concurrency; state
manipulation; interfaces to C and other languages; graphical user
interface toolkits; more expressive type systems (eg records,
local quantification, connections with object-oriented
programming); application frameworks.
(I will be on sabbatical at the Oregon Graduate Institute during
1996/7, but I hope to take any new research students there with me.)
* Satnam Singh http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~satnam
- Using functional languages for hardware description. Applying
functional language compiler technology to hardware description
languages e.g. partial evaluation and semantic-based program
transformation. Developing novel hardware description techniques
for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
All this work revolves around the Glasgow Ruby compiler, which is
being developed in Haskell.
- Graphical interface toolkits for functional languages.
* Philip Wadler http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wadler
To make functional programming work, we need links to industry, and
a firm foundation in theory. On the industry side:
- Java, designed by Sun and adopted by Netscape, incorporates one of
the great ideas of functional programming: heap allocated, safe
storage. In collaboration with Karlsruhe, we are designing and
implementing Pizza, a superset of Java that incorporates other
great FP ideas.
- We are collaborating with Ericsson to design a type system for
Erlang. Erlang is a concurrent, functional language used to
implement phone switches, and there are Erlang programs whose
length measures in 100Ks of lines.
On the theory side areas of interest include: monads, linear logic,
type theory, category theory, deforestation, and parametricity.
Background information
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow is
seeking applications for postgraduate study from highly qualified and
motivated candidates. The department conducts an very active programme
of research and covers a broad range of topics including:
communications, distributed systems, formal methods, functional
programming, graphics and interactive systems, information retrieval,
operating systems and persistent systems. We have EPSRC studentships
available in all of these areas for UK and European students and a
limited number of open studentships.
The Functional Programming Group is an internationally-recognised
centre of research in the theory, design, implementation and
application of functional programming languages, especially (but not
exclusively) the lazy variety. We emphasise the interplay between
theory and practice; we try to chip away at the practical obstacles
that prevent functional languages from being used more widely, using
these challenges to guide and motivate our research priorities.
The Department is a large community, with 33 academic staff, 28
research staff, 27 support staff, and about 400 students, including 40
full-time PhD students. The Department is top-rated for both research
and teaching in the UK's national research and teaching assessment
exercises. Even though we are large we have a friendly and supportive
work environment. The Department's computing environment is based
mainly on Sun and Macintosh workstations, with over 350 Macintoshes
and approximately 130 Suns.
Glasgow is located on the scenic west coast of Scotland, a short distance
>from some breathtaking countryside.
For more information visit our WWW home page at
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/fp
or for specific information on postgraduate studies
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/courses/pg-research/
For written information and application forms contact
Helen McNee
Department of Computing Science
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, G12 8QQ UK
Phone: +44 (0)141 330 6047
Fax: +44 (0)141 330 4913
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
or contact one of the above named academic staff direct.
(You can get their contact details from their WWW page. Their
email address is easily derived from their WWW URL; eg O'Donnell
is [EMAIL PROTECTED])
