Stephen Kell

This is Stephen's attic, where he puts old home page content that has become uninteresting (to most!).

Research

During my PhD, to get my head around publication venues, I wrote a calendar of approximate submission deadlines and event dates for most of the conferences and workshops that I might conceivably attend (together with a few for which it was verging on inconceivable, even then). It's now dated, but in case it's useful anyway, here it is.

PhD work

The main focus of my PhD work was Cake, a special-purpose language for describing relations between the interfaces of binary components (specifically, relocatable object code). Cake makes heavy use of DWARF debugging information, and can be considered interesting in several ways: as a domain-specific rule-based programming language; as a “composition”, “configuration” or “linking” language; as a dynamic language; as a runtime system sharing commonalities with garbage collectors and debuggers. It does not really make contributions in the domains of module systems or linking models.

Support and acknowledgements

I'm very grateful to EPSRC and Cambridge Philosophical Society for the funds which supported my PhD research work and some related travel, and to the Graduate Research Fund and Emily & Gordon Bottomley Fund of Christ's College, EuroSys, The Royal Academy of Engineering, ACM SIGSOFT and ACM SIGPLAN for additional support of my research travel and conference attendance.

Stephen's research prehistory

Service

In Cambridge

During my PhD, I had various roles in the NetOS group, in particular coordinating talklets from January 2009 until January 2010, holding a librarian-like role of curating a small group library and keeping track of the various books we had lying around, and being maintainer-of-sorts to the Atlas Room BBC Micro (about which I should write more some time).

Teaching

The remainder of this section refers to past activity, mostly at the University of Cambridge.

Supervisions a.k.a. tutorials

In Cambridge I have supervised (tutored) many systems and programming courses from the Computer Science Tripos. The list below includes both current and past courses I supervised, together with any additional materials I prepared—including my own exercises. Some of my exercises have since been adopted by others and curated within the Otter system.

Courses currently offered

Older courses

During spring 2011 I was a tutor for the Digital Systems course in Oxford.

Guest lectures

In April 2010 I gave a lecture to the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science class in Cambridge, as part of the Cambridge Programming Research Group mini-series within the Research Students' Lecture series. My lecture was entitled “Modularity – what, why and how”. Contact me for slides. Other lectures in the CPRG mini-series were given by Dominic Orchard, Max Bolingbroke and Robin Message.

Demonstrating, etc

During Michaelmas 2009, in Cambridge, I demonstrated the MPhil course Building an Internet Router, run by Andrew Moore.

During Easter 2008, 2009 and 2010 I was an Assessor for the numerical computing exercise undertaken by Part IA Natural Science students and lectured by Dr Frank King. (This course had no web presence!)

Content updated at Tue 21 Sep 18:53:00 BST 2021.
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