EAPLS Board members elections 2020

The role of EAPLS is critical to both preserve and expand the programming languages and systems research in Europe. EAPLS awards celebrate excellence among the community, the organized conferences and events bring the community together and welcomes new researchers, and the online presence keeps EAPLS members informed.

 

Until now I have been serving the Programming Languages community in various ways. As a member of the Haskell.org committee I have organized Summer of Haskell 2017 and 2018 and promote the committee activities thought twitter. I have chaired and co-chaired 5 venues among which POPL 2019 Student Research Competition (SRC) and Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) at ICFP 2018. I highly value the impact of venues such as SRC and PLMW to the academic society, since they welcome and sponsor young researchers and I am very enthusiastic to organize relevant venues under EAPLS.

 

In short, by joining the EAPLS board I aim to initiate scientific events and increase EAPLS's online presence with the goal to bring the european programming languages and systems community closer and make it even more welcoming to young researchers.

I think it is important for EAPLS to create awareness of the fact that research areas like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of Things and Edge/Fog/Cloud computing need systematic contributions from research on programming languages and systems.

 

I would like to contribute to make more explicit the links between EAPLS activities and EC funding opportunities and to connect the activities of EAPLS to the activities of associations like, e.g., the Big Data Value Association (BDVA, http://www.bdva.eu/) and the Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI, https://aioti.eu/).

Short Bio. Maribel Fernández is a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. She obtained her PhD in Paris in 1993, and her Habilitation in 2000 while she was a Maître de conférences at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). Her research interests include computation models, specification and programming languages, and the development of tools for the analysis and verification of complex systems. She uses rewriting-based techniques to analyse the dynamic behaviour, security and reliability of systems (e.g., software applications, bio-chemical systems), and has developed modelling and simulation tools in collaboration with researchers in France and the UK. She has also written textbooks on programming languages and computation models to introduce these research areas to undergraduate and MSc students. She is a member of the EAPLS PhD award panel since 2011, and was a member of the ACM-W scholarships panel (2012-2018), which encourages female students in Computer Science to do research through grants and mentoring.

Statement. If elected, I will take an active role in the ongoing functions of the board and would like to work with the board members to focus on two important aspects for the future of EAPLS:

• To look into ways to ensure that the research on all areas related to the topics of EAPLS gets more visibility. I would like to continue the work done to deepen and broaden the scope of EAPLS. One way of doing that is to highlight the role of research on programming languages and related techniques in a variety of areas beyond the traditional ones, for example, in data modelling, planning, security and privacy, computational linguistics, etc.
• I would like to see growth in the number of submissions to all the conferences under the umbrella of EAPLS, to ensure their long term success. I see scope to achieve this through encouraging submissions from countries, groups and individuals that currently do not take an active part in EAPLS.

I believe these two actions are of great benefit to EAPLS, and I am confident that I can contribute in a very positive way to achieve these goals.

I am @grammarware, also known as V.Zaytsev. I've worked in various academic places in Europe (CWI, VU, UvA, Uni.Koblenz) doing research on programming languages, grammars, parsing, compilers, refactoring, software modelling and all that. Since 2016 I am the Chief Science Officer of Raincode, a Belgian industrial company serving as compiler and program analysis and transformation mercenaries. Under my guidance the company has increased their relations with the academia manyfold, moving from publishing 2 papers per decade to 5-10 papers a year, as well as sponsoring several LLVM events, conferences like CC and SLE, even event umbrellas like SPLASH, on levels comparable to Microsoft, a company ~3000 times larger - see https://www.raincodelabs.com/academics-2/ for measurable details. I have served in PCs of many conferences over the years (ASE, SCAM, SANER, ICPC, SLE, LDTA, etc), been an external reviewer for many major journals in the PL field (COMLAN, SoSyM, JSS, SCP, TSE, EMSE, JSME), co-organised many workshops and conferences, chaired paper and artefact evaluation committees, edited proceedings volumes, submitted and PI-d research grants. I believe that even though I have no current affiliation with any university, I can make valuable contributions to EAPLS, since my own mission resonates well with the announced EAPLS goal to "stimulate research in the area of programming languages and systems".

EAPLS has the potential to grow in several areas: promoting Open Access publication and reproducible software artefacts, a broader digital presence, and maintaining its leadership role in unifying Programming Languages and Systems researchers. If appointed to the EAPLS board, I would lead efforts in pushing EAPLS further into these areas.

 

To facilitate reproducible science and technology transfer to industry, EAPLS should aim to influence policy on open access publication and artefact evaluation processes. I would lead efforts to encourage all EAPLS related conferences establish their own Open Access publication and Artefact Evaluation processes, with guidance from the Software Sustainability Institute and The Carpentries (Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry). To connect EAPLS with local levels, I would connect EAPLS with the national UK research pools, such as SICSA funded by the Scottish Funding Council.

 

To raise awareness of the educational and economic impact wider EAPLS research areas with industry and the wider public, I would set up digital platforms for EAPLS such as podcast interviews with research leaders in the EAPLS areas.

 

To raise awareness about EAPLS within academia, I would propose EAPLS workshops co-located with international conferences to tighten connections between type theorists, verification experts and programming language practitioners. The goal of these EAPLS workshops would be to highlight the excellence in the field from across Europe, promote PhD research with workshop awards, build networks for early career researchers and encourage better knowledge transfer activities with industry. I already have experience doing this e.g. co-chairing RWDSL co-located with CGO.

 

My research is at the interface between programming language design, verification and implementation for HPC and FPGA architectures, including my PhD language HdpH-RS for HPC (shortlisted for the EAPLS Best PhD Dissertation Award in 2014), DSLs for FPGAs and dataflow model verification.

 

My European research collaborations include exchanges to EPFL, Switzerland, funded by SICSA. This SICSA scheme has a track record of establishing EU collaborations with Scottish institutes. As an EAPLS board member, I would design an EAPLS support network scheme based on the successful SICSA researcher exchange schemes that I was fortunate to benefit from.