UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
    	     COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

	     		        presents


         "Types and programming for safe interactions"
				 


		               Dr. Raymond Hu

	   (School of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire)

		              12 November 2019 

			             13:00 - 14:00 


		        Hatfield, College Lane Campus
		             Seminar Room C400

	    	    Everyone is welcome to attend

	     	    Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

Many programmers enjoy and rely on -- take for granted, perhaps -- the
benefits of types in programming languages.  In practical terms, the essence
of a type system is a lightweight formal method for safely ruling out certain
classes of errors, such as attempting an invalid operation on the data at
hand.  Types further serve as compiler-verified documentation, and can be
exploited for peformance optimisations.

This talk looks beyond the traditional notion of data types to consider types
for interactions -- behavioural types.  Here, we refer to interaction in a
general sense, wherever a set of programs collaborate via some form of
message passing communication.  This encompasses the Internet applications
we use on a daily basis, agent systems, Web services, data-centric parallel
algorithms, and so forth.

The first part of this talk introduces the theory of session types, one of the
well established methods in behavioural types.  Whereas data types describe
data structures, session types describe interaction structures, i.e.,
communication protocols.  The second part demonstrates implementations and
applications of session types to practical programming, in particular the
Scribble framework based on multiparty session types.

About the speaker:

Raymond Hu joined the University of Hertfordshire as a Senior Lecturer in May
2019.  He previously held Research Associate and Fellowship positions in the
Dept. of Computing at Imperial College London, where he also received his
Ph.D. and M.Sc.  His research focuses on the theory and practice of type
systems for concurrent and distributed computing.  Recent work includes
developments in session types to support protocols with dynamic and
parameterised participants, fault-tolerance, and integrations with refinement
types.