Simon Thompson

Professor of Logic and Computation

Photo of SJ Thompson, if available
  • Room SW109
    School of Computing
    University of Kent,
    CT2 7NF
My current research interests are in functional programming, reasoning and multimedia. A list of all my publications is available here. Specific projects that I am working on include:
I am also interested in working with industry, and have 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.

Books

I have written four books on functional programming.

Postgrad research students

I am very keen to recruit research students to work with me on these topics, and particularly in refactoring, extending XML-based languages and reasoning with diagrams. The Lab'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 refactoring for Haskell, refactoring for Erlang, and the formal verification of refactoring transformations.

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.

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 computer algebra, verification and constructive type theory: