EAPLS Board member elections 2010

In June 2010, several board members had to be elected. EAPLS members were able to vote for their favorite candidate. The elections were open until 15th of June 2010. The following candidates could be elected:

Peter Van Roy

Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/distribution.html

The field of computer science is changing profoundly. Computing systems now have the processing power, storage capacity, and networking ability to easily handle enormous data sets. Data-intensive computing using large-scale distributed algorithms is realizing one by one the old dreams of artificial intelligence. Traditional research in programming languages and systems has solved most of the problems of computing with small data sets. It must now grow up and address computing with large data sets, for which programming languages at a much higher level of abstraction are needed. This is already happening: data-intensive language abstractions (of which map-reduce and its relatives are just the tip of the iceberg) are already catalyzing the new computer science. As a member of the EAPLS board, I will encourage programming language research to move in this direction, as a key part of the new computer science.

Tom Schrijvers

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
www.cs.kuleuven.be/~toms/

I am a senior postdoc (with 5 years of experience) active in different programming language communities, particularly Functional and Logic Programming. I believe that it is important to strengthen the European role in in programming languages and systems research through increased visibility and funding.

By joining the EAPLS Board I would like to improve the visibility of EAPLS in the Functional and Logic Programming communities, foster joint organization of events and promote interaction between different subcommunities. For instance, as a member of the Executive Committee of the Association for Logic Programming, I could act as a liaison.

I think EAPLS has a unique position at the European level to help the community with their increasing difficulties to obtain funding for programming languages and systems research. On the board I would like to contribute to addressing this issue by stimulating joint funding applications, coordinating the publication model for conferences / journals in our field to allow better comparison with other fields according to metrics used by funding agencies etc.

Greg Michaelson

Heriot-Watt University
www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~greg

While EAPLS is a mature organisation with a large membership, its main service to our community is as an information point, predominately through the email list. I think that EAPLS should now initiate an annual international conference on programming languages and systems, aiming for the same status as POPL. EAPLS would maintain a standing advisory group and a central fund. Individuals would bid to host the conference. EAPLS would then agree to underwrite any loss to some well defined limit in exchange for any profits being returned to the fund. As the fund grew, EAPLS could use it to enhance subsequent conferences, for example by supporting student attendees and key note speakers. The advisory committe would be composed of the EAPLS board, the immediate past conference chair and the forthcoming conference chair. One of the first actions of the advisory committee would be to establish links with a major internation publisher such as Springer or CUP to publish the annual refereed proceedings.

Mark van den Brand

Eindhoven University of Technology
www.win.tue.nl/~mvdbrand

EAPLS is an inportant organization for the research community on Programming Languages and Systems. EAPLS facilitates exchanges on information of conferences and jobs, and a best paper award at ETAPS. It is important that EAPLS becomes more visible in our research community. There are several options, one could be to have more awards, best paper, best PhD thesis, etc. A number of these actions are already on its way. It is important to find the right balance between the effort involved and the effect it will have. The most important aspect is how the research community benefits of all these actions.

I have been secretary of EAPLS for almost 10 years. In this period I have observed that launching ideas is very easy, but to make them concrete is very hard. The last 3 years the revival of the EAPLS website was one of the priorities. It has been redesigned and by active mailings we hope to transform it into a real information exchange medium. As board member I would like to continue this work and serve our research community.

Alexander Paar

University of Pretoria
www.alexpaar.de

I am a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. I studied computer science at Technische Universität Clausthal (Germany), UC Irvine (USA), and Universität Karlsruhe (Germany). Last year, I received a doctor's degree (Dr.-Ing.) from Universität Karlsruhe. I am experienced in teaching graduate level courses and delivering industrial training on software engineering and programming languages. I was awarded a bronze and a silver medal for coaching university students for the ACM ICPC programming contest. At Universität Karlsruhe, I contributed to the integrated European research project CHIL from conception to completion and successfully prepared a financial audit by the European Commission, which covered a period of three years time. I served as a program committee member for several computer science workshops and the first incarnation of the CLOSER conference. I reviewed submissions to various computer science workshops, conferences, and journals – among those the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. I am a member of EAPLS, ACM, IEEE CS, and Gesellschaft für Informatik.

In recent years, emerging schema and ontology languages and the advent of affordable multi-core computers triggered the fusion of previously distinct type system and programming paradigms to better accommodate dynamic content and parallel execution. The current state of programming language research is difficult to grasp for researchers and practitioner alike. In particular, software developers in the industry often struggle to use (combinations of) new programming language features correctly. The scale and the pace of the recent evolution of programming languages make the work of associations such as EAPLS more important than ever before. As a board member of the European Association for Programming Languages and Systems I would strive to foster the application of current research results in the industry. I am firmly convinced that orchestrated dissemination efforts organized by EAPLS will be an advantage for both academia and industry. Professional software developers will become aware of how to apply additional programming language features and paradigms correctly. At the same time, a closer collaboration with the industry might in turn facilitate the evolution of currently small-scale individual research activities into complete and industry-backed compiler infrastructures.

Stefan Gruner

University of Pretoria,
www.stefan-gruner.de

If I would beelected onto the Board, I would like to act as a "bridge" between EAPLS, EASST and FME, because I am also a member of EASST and FME. I would emphasise the role of programming languages (EAPLS topic) in the domain of software engineering. This would not only include programming languages in the narrow sense of the word, but also specification languages such as CSP, and the like.

Herbert Wiklicky

Imperial College London
www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~herbert

There are two aspects I would hope I could contribute to the development of EAPLS in future: one being the scientific topics supported by EAPLS the other related to the role of Computer Science and Programming Language research in a wider political, economical and cultural context. This concerns in particular the involvement of young researchers and the development of new research topics.

The research area I personally would like to see represented within EAPLS in a more prominent way concern most importantly quantitative aspects of programming languages (in relation, for example, to computational costs, security, energy consumption, etc.) as well as new programming paradigms like quantum computation. For a number of years I have been involved in the organisation of an ETAPS workshop devoted to this issue (QAPL - Quantitative Aspects of Programming Languages).

I also believe that EAPLS as the official co-organiser of ETAPS should play a more visible political role, e.g. by lobbying relevant bodies, in coordination with other organisations like EATCS - developing on the long run perhaps into a kind of European ACM without the organisational overhead. As an example, I would think of the recent discussion on the role of conferences as publication (and promotion) tools in CS initiated by Moshe Vardi in the CACM - where I think a distinct a European voice is missing.

Simone Campanoni

Harvard University,
www.eecs.harvard.edu/~xan

Currently I am working on coarse-grain and fine-grain parallelism detection and exploitation in irregular programs (e.g. C programs). I believe that in the near future, more efforts should be spent to help developers writing multi-threaded programs providing a compilation framework to organize and manage threads automatically. Moreover, the design of source programming language should be aware about these kinds of parallelism in order to help both developers and compilers to get runtime performance and to find automatically errors within programs as well (in order to minimize the Time To Market of software products).

I would like to be a EAPLS Board Member in order to find collaborators to both satisfy my interests in programming languages and compiler systems and to discuss about both future research topics and possible approaches.

Simone Campanoni is a Postdoc in Computer Science at Harvard University under Prof. David Brooks, working in conjunction with Prof. Michael D. Smith and Prof. Gu-yeon Wei. His work focuses on the boundary between hardware and software, relying on dynamic compilation, run-time optimizations and virtual execution environments for investigating opportunities on auto-parallelization. He received his Ph.D. degree from Politecnico di Milano University in 2009 and is the author of ILDJIT (http://ildjit.sourceforge.net), a parallel dynamic compiler demonstrating principles from his thesis work. ILDJIT includes both static and dynamic compilers, targeting CIL bytecode for ARM and x86 platforms. It is used to investigate new approaches for program introspection, optimization and even microarchitectural design, receiving over 16,000 downloads since its release in September of 2007.

Edward S. Lowry

Advanced Information Microstructures
users.rcn.com/eslowry

The central problem of computer language design has always been to express precise information simply. There are five major sources of inexcusable complexity caused by the defective design of currently used computer languages. See "Inexcusable Complexity" on my web site. Progress on launching language that avoids those defects has been obstructed for over 35 years. The result is a widening swath of death, destruction, ignorance, agony, waste, criminality, and dangers to the security of nations. See "Technical Fluency Stifled for Decades" on my web site.

I think that what is important for EAPLS is to move computer language technology past this "dark age".

I am almost certainly the most competent expert anywhere in language technology for expressing precise information simply. I am probably 35 years ahead of anyone in Europe. I would be very interested in learning about any exceptions. There is a simple test at the end of the above papers that would probably identify exceptions. By joining the EAPLS Board (and joining EAPLS), I would hope to stimulate a major practical advance in computer language technology that eliminates large amounts of debilitating and inexcusable complexity.