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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
Simon Thompson
Professor of Logic and Computation
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| Wrangler: a refactoring tool for Erlang. | Third edition of Haskell: the Craft of Functional Programming |
Erlang by Example video, Francesco Cesarini and Simon, O'Reilly.
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My main research interests are in functional programming, most recently to help people to write programs more effectively. In particular, together with Huiqing Li I have been working on building refactoring tools for functional programs in Erlang and Haskell, supported by EU and EPSRC funding. I have also worked in reasoning and multimedia.
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| Porting Erlang to massively-multicore systems. Here we'll be developing refactorings to support multicore programs in SD-Erlang, as well as building tools for offline and online monitoring, working in conjunction with Uppsala University and ICCS, Athens.. | Supporting property-based testing for Erlang and C. We extended Wrangler to refactor tests with their programs, as well as developing clone-detection facilities we use in property extraction. | Web-based, asynchronous, online learning for Erlang. The hottest aspect of this is the tool providing advanced feedback on programming problems. |
A list of all my publications is available here.
I am also interested in working with industry, and have had two Knowledge Transfer Partnerships with Erlang Solutions: the first (now completed) on refactoring and components for Erlang, the second on using e-learning technologies in high-quality online training.
Some recent presentations and talks
Some recent talks and presentations and talks, in a variety of formats.
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Books
I have written four books on functional programming.
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Postgrad research students
I am very keen to recruit research students to work with me on these topics, and particularly in refactoring, performance monitoring, property-based testing and model extraction. The School's website has lots of stuff about becoming a postgrad student and some suggested projects in my and related areas of interest.Current students are working on implementing Haskell, e-learning for Erlang, and diagrammatic reasoning.
Functional Programming in Education
I work to promote the use of functional programming in education. I was chair of the conference on Functional and Declarative Programming in Education in 2005 (Tallin), 2002 (Pittsburgh) and 1999 (Paris). I have written texts on introductory functional programming in Haskell and Miranda as well as a problem solving approach for beginning functional programmers.
Journal of Functional Programming
I am book reviews editor for the Journal of Functional Programming. If you are interested in becoming a reviewer, please see books currently seeking reviewers and book review guidelines. At the University of Kent I play an active role in the Functional Programming Group.
Teaching innovation
I am an enthusiastic user of the ProfCast software for recording lectures in sync with their slide presentations. You can see examples at CO524, an introductory course on programming language technology. If you are trying these out, it's best to ignore the first; I was just getting used to the microphone on my PowerBook.
A student from the course says "I'm finding during revision that the recordings are immensely useful, if I come across a topic that isn't well explained in the slides or my notes it's great to be able to listen back to your explanations with the slides on screen and write new notes for revision purposes."
Other research
Other research that I have been involved with recently includes work in refactoring, reasoning with diagrams, computer algebra, verification and constructive type theory:
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