We have a fixed-term position at the School of Computing, Dundee for a postdoctoral researcher to work on the project

Coalgebraic Logic Programming for Type Inference:

a new generation of languages for parallelism and corecursion.  

More details are available below and

at http://staff.computing.dundee.ac.uk/katya/CoALP/

For further inquiries please email me:

Katya Komendantskaya <katya@computing.dundee.ac.uk>

School of Computing

University of Dundee

Postdoctoral Researcher in

Coalgebraic Logic Programming for Type Inference

Fixed-term position for 2 years (extension possible).

Start date: between 1 July 2014 and 1 October 2014;

Salary scale: between £29,837 and £33,5562 per annum.

Closing Date for applications: 16 June 2014.

The School of Computing at the University of Dundee invites

applications for a postdoctoral researcher to work on an interdisciplinary  project

"Coalgebraic Logic Programming for type inference: a new generation of languages  for parallelism and corecursion" (http://staff.computing.dundee.ac.uk/katya/CoALP/).

The project spans several subjects, among which are:  

-   -- Computational Logic,

-   -- (Coalgebraic) Operational semantics,

-   -- Functional Programming;  

-   -- Logic Programming,

-   -- Recursion and Corecursion in Programming languages;

-- Category Theory,

-   -- Type Theory;

-   -- Compilers

-   -- Parallelism and Concurrency

The project is jointly led by

Dr E.Komendantskaya, University of Dundee

and

Dr J.Power, University of Bath.

We are looking for a researcher to spend up to 29 months in the Dundee team developing CoALP-based type inference.  This will involve close collaboration with the existing group members, as well as interaction with the project partners.  Research experience of at least a PhD level in computer science or mathematics is essential, as is some knowledge of either functional programming or  automated/interactive theorem provers.

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Project description:

The main goal of typing is to prevent the occurrence

of execution errors during the running of a program.

Milner formalised the idea, showing that ``well-typed programs cannot go wrong''. In practice, type structures provide a fundamental technique of reducing programmer errors. At their strongest, they cover most of the properties of interest to the verification community. A major trend in the development of functional languages is improvement in expressiveness of the underlying type system, e.g., in terms of Dependent Types, Type Classes, Generalised Algebraic Types (GADTs), Dependent Type Classes and Canonical Structures. Milner-style decidable type inference does not always suffice for such extensions (e.g. the principal type may no longer exist), and deciding well-typedness sometimes requires computation additional to compile-time type inference. Implementations of new type inference algorithms include a variety of first-order decision procedures, notably Unification and Logic Programming (LP), Constraint LP, LP embedded into interactive tactics (Coq's eauto), and LP supplemented by rewriting.

A second major trend is parallelism: the absence of side-effects makes it easy to evaluate sub-expressions in parallel. Powerful abstraction mechanisms of function composition and higher-order functions play important roles in parallelisation. Three major parallel languages are Eden (explicit parallelism), Parallel ML (implicit parallelism) and Glasgow parallel Haskell (semi-explicit parallelism). Control parallelism in particular distinguishes functional languages. Type inference becomes more sophisticated and takes a bigger role in the overall program development.

In this project, we have devloped a new dialect of logic programming -- Coalgebraic Logic Programming (CoALP) that features both extra expressiveness (via corecursion) and parallelism in one algorithm. We propose to use CoALP in place of LP tools currently used in type inference.

With the mentioned major developments in Corecursion, Parallelism, and Typeful (functional) programming it has become vital for these disjoint communities to combine their efforts: enriched type theories rely more and more on the new generation of LP languages; coalgebraic semantics has become influential in language design; and parallel dialects of languages have huge potential in applying common techniques across the FP/LP programming paradigm. This project is unique in bringing together local and international collaborators working in the three communities.

See http://staff.computing.dundee.ac.uk/katya/CoALP/ for more details.

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