EAPLS board elections

by Christoph Lembeck, April 4, 2006

Several board members have to be elected. If you are an EAPLS member please vote for your favorite candidate by March 31.

Several board members have to be elected. If you are an EAPLS member please vote for your favorite candidate by April 30. The following candidates can be elected:

Jens Knoop, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
email: [email protected]
URL: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/knoop

Description:
If elected, I would like to work with the other EAPLS-Board Members on further enlarging the visibility of EAPLS in the scientific community and on further enhancing the possibilities of the EAPLS members to contribute to EAPLS and to benefit from it. First activities towards these goals, which I consider important for the further prosper development of EAPLS, could include the (already planned) EAPLS newsletter, the creation of EAPLS awards for outstanding dissertations and contributions to the field, and the origination of new EAPLS activities such as an Annual EAPLS Autumn School complementing the current conference activities of EAPLS at ETAPS in spring, and perspectively offering the opportunity to generate a revenue for EAPLS enabling it to initiate new activities such as providing student travel grants for attending EAPLS-(co-)organized events.

Greg Michaelson
Head of Computer Science
School of Mathematical & Computer Sciences Heriot-Watt University
email: [email protected]
URL: www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~greg

Description:
EAPLS is a vital forum for enabling innovative international programming language research and collaboration. I wish to enhance EAPLS's presence through an annual event. I could edit a newsletter if no one else wants to but for a fixed period only and preferably after October 2007 when I stop being Head of Department.

Giorgio Ghelli, Dipartimento di Informatica, Pisa University
email: [email protected]
URL: http://www.di.unipi.it/~ghelli

Description:
I think that it is important for EAPLS to promote activities which help the researchers in the PLS area to stay in touch with people who work in the IT field, to help us learning about the new needs that arise, and to help practitioners to learn about the techniques that we are developing. This is what I would like to help achieving as part of the board.

Arend Rensink
Department of Computer Science, University of Twente
email: [email protected]
URL: http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~rensink/

Description:
Whenever we design a software system, we need a language or, more usually, a combination of languages, to write the design in. Traditionally the only type of language (apart from natural language) that has really served the purpose of specifying software systems is on the level of code; that is, programming languages. Despite all efforts to introduce higher-level modelling languages, a good understanding of their semantics is still missing, and so these models are typically used only as intermediate, throw-away artefacts. I would like to generalise the concept of a programming language to /software language/ and include into that category any textual or visual language with a syntax and semantics that is unambiguously defined and which we can therefore use with confidence to design software systems, knowing for sure that anything implemented according to that design will have the specified behaviour. In order to reach that goal, we need a better theory of syntax and semantics also for visual languages, as well as a (meta-)language for specifying language semantics.