Programming Languages

Research in Programming Languages and Systems at Imperial spans foundational issues in language semantics right through to the design and implementation of new languages, including compilers and domain-specific techniques to achieve performance, parallelism and correctness.

Key areas include: programming language semantics and type systems, including type systems for concurrent, distributed and parallel computing, and semantics for web programming languages; new programming models and domain-specific languages for emerging application areas; domain-specific code generation and optimization; runtime systems and operating system support for concurrency, parallelism and energy efficiency; program analysis techniques for improving the reliability and security of software at various levels of abstraction, from systems software through to web applications; techniques and tools for rigorous testing of programming language implementations; and techniques and tools for reasoning about concurrency and parallelism in modern programming languages.

Groups

Centres

Centre for Computational Methods in Science and Engineering (CMSE)

Academics

Dr Cristian Cadar

Personal details
Dr Cristian Cadar Professor in Software Reliability
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8244

Research interests

Software Engineering, Computer Systems and Software Security, with a focus on building practical techniques for improving the reliability and security of software systems.

Location

435, Huxley Building
Dr Alastair Donaldson

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Dr Alastair Donaldson Professor
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8266

Research interests

Formal verification techniques for multicore software. Software performance optimization for multicore processors.

Location

422, Huxley Building
Prof. Sophia Drossopoulou

Personal details
Prof. Sophia Drossopoulou Professor of Programming Languages
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8368

Research interests

Object Capability Policies, Concurrent Programming, Program Verification, Characterization of Program Evolution and Theorem Proving.

Location

559, Huxley Building
Prof. Susan Eisenbach

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Prof. Susan Eisenbach Emeritus Professor
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8264

Research interests

Programming Languages, Concurrency and Testing.

Location

569, Huxley Building
Dr Tony Field

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Dr Tony Field Reader in Performance Engineering
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8364

Research interests

Engineering for High-Performance, Virtual-time program execution (VTE), Functional programming, Individual-based models (IbMs).

Location

354, Huxley Building
Dr Antonio Filieri

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Dr Antonio Filieri Lecturer
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 9478

Research interests

Exact and approximate methods for probabilistic software analysis and probabilistic programming, Control Theory for Software Engineering, and Runtime-efficient and incremental verification of quantitative and functional software properties.

Location

572, Huxley Building
Prof. Philippa Gardner

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Prof. Philippa Gardner Professor of Theoretical Computer Science
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8292

Research interests

JavaScript, Concurrency and Resource Reasoning.

Location

453, Huxley Building
Prof. Chris Hankin

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Prof. Chris Hankin Director, Institute for Security Science & Technology
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 7619

Research interests

Security, Program Analysis and Programming Language Theory.

Location

Sherfield Building
Prof. Paul Kelly

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Prof. Paul Kelly Professor of Software Technology
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8332

Research interests

Languages, compilers, operating systems for parallel computing. Domain-specific tools and active libraries. Computer systems issues underlying performance. Software tools for portable parallel programming. Irregular and data-intensive applications. Applying a broad range of mathematical and theoretical ideas to computer systems problems. Performance evaluation, modelling and prediction. Caching, combining and randomisation in processors, multiprocessors, operating systems and wide-area networks and Language, linguistics, literature, literary theory.

Location

L3 (upstairs), William Penney Building
304, Huxley Building
Dr Ben Livshits

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Dr Ben Livshits Reader
Send email

Research interests

Security, Privacy, Program Analysis, Compilers, Software Engineering and Crowdsourcing.

Location

569, Huxley Building
Prof. Wayne Luk

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Prof. Wayne Luk Professor of Computer Engineering
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8313

Research interests

Hardware and Architecture, Reconfigurable Computing, Design Automation.

Location

434, Huxley Building
Dr Sergio Maffeis

Personal details
Dr Sergio Maffeis Senior Lecturer
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8390

Research interests

Computer Security, Web Programming and Process Calculi.

Location

441, Huxley Building
Dr. Azalea Raad

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Dr. Azalea Raad Lecturer
Send email

Location

Huxley Building
Dr Herbert Wiklicky

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Dr Herbert Wiklicky Reader in Computer Science
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8206

Research interests

Program Analysis, semantics of programming languages, Probabilistic Models, Program Synthesis, semantics in Computer Security and Quantum Computation.

Location

424, Huxley Building
Dr. Nicolas Wu

Personal details
Dr. Nicolas Wu Senior Lecturer
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8189

Research interests

Dr. Wu's research interests are centred around programming languages, where he has made advances in applications of category theory for giving the semantics of programs and algorithms. In particular, his recent work has been focused on showing the connections between domain specific languages, algebraic effect handlers, and structured recursion schemes.

Location

374, Huxley Building
Prof. Nobuko Yoshida

Personal details
Prof. Nobuko Yoshida Professor of Computing
Send email+44 (0)20 7594 8240

Research interests

Theoretical Computer Science.

Location

556, Huxley Building