Postgraduate research in Functional Programming at the University of Glasgow

• John O'Donnell
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  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 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: helen@dcs.gla.ac.uk

or contact one of the above named academic staff direct. (You can get their contact details from their WWW page.)

Last changed: $Date: 1996/05/13 10:10:57 $