Rebooting the Blog: What have I been up to?

Updated: 2017-11-20

Before starting this post I looked at the timestamp of my last entry, and it was 357 days ago on the dot! I totally didn’t do this on purpose, but I have been meaning to start my blog back up again. This post is going to be very basic, and just talk about some new stuff I have been doing over the last year, and set things up for future posts. Where to begin?

First, as many of you know I am at, Augusta University, a small primarily undergraduate university who is committed to growing as a new research school. They are also very committed to computer science and information technology. In fact, CS was mentioned in the newly released strategic plan as an area of growth. As part of this growth we are actively hiring new people. In fact, we are hiring right now in all areas which means computational logic, PL, and verification. There are two positions in CS available. Please apply, and I am happy to answer any questions!

One thing I am trying to do is get a small group in computational logic built here at Augusta, and so last semester I advertised and lobbied pretty hard to get someone else hired in here in my area of research. I am happy to report that we hired Clément Aubert! He is interested in substructural logics, implicit complexity, categorical logic, and the like. It is really nice to have someone around that can speak the same language to bounce ideas off of, and start new projects. He is getting settled in, and so I try not to bother him too much, but we do have a couple of things in the works all ready.

We started Fibrational Fridays! This is an informal seminar of two where we are learning fibrational models of logic and type theory. However, we had to move our meeting time to Monday’s, and so, we are now having Fibrational Mondays, but the name does not quite roll off of the tongue as nice. This is a great meeting that is low pressure. We just get together and do proofs for 90 minutes. I am really enjoying fibrations, and I am looking forward to pulling them into my research.

Perhaps a bit more interesting is a new regional workshop we are starting. The workshop is going to be called the Southeast Regional Programming Languages Seminar. The topics of the workshop will be extremely broad so as to get as many people together as we can. Recently, I put out an informal survey requesting to hear from any interested people; if you are interested please let me know. We got lots of feedback, encouragement, and interest. I was blown away actually!

The point of the workshop is to get researchers in the southeast together and network, but hopefully, create new friendships and collaborations. The format will be modeled after the Midwest Verification Day (MVD) which started at my alma mater the University of Iowa. It will have long breaks and short talks, and anyone interested will be allowed to give a talk, and so, talks by new students, and by people wanting to get feedback on ongoing work will be highly encouraged. The target time of the event is Spring 2019, and so lots of time, but we are starting now to secure funding to be able to pay for an invited speaker, food, and the most important part, travel support for students and postdocs. Finally, it is our hope that this workshop is annual, and begins to be hosted at different schools in the region.

This brings me to my research. Oh, my research, so many interesting problems to work on, sometimes its hard to pick, and I can’t get them out of mind. All of my undergraduate research assistants have graduated, but I managed to hire two more this semester, and I am looking forward to our collaborations. Over the summer I was fortunate enough to work with two visiting PhD students who both did amazing work. I also have a few new papers, checkout my website by clicking “Author” above. Finally, the questions I am currently pursuing are equivalence of attack trees, adjoint models of substructural logics, and the most important and fun problem, defining a full linear dependent type theory. The last one is the one I’m most excited about, and the one I spend the most of my time on, but I am also really excited about a new efficient algorithm for deciding equivalence of attack trees. More on each of these problems soon.

It feels good to writing posts again; stay tuned!


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