Our research intern Todd Waugh Ambridge will present the paper Global Optimisation with Constructive Reals at the ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science. Abstract—We draw new connections between deterministic, complete, and general global optimisation of continuous functions and a generalised notion of regression, using constructive type theory and computable real numbers. Using this foundation we […]

Data-with-a-hole-in-it: differential operators on data structures Thursday June 3 from 9.30 am This talk is a tutorial on the differential calculus, applied to the algebraic structure of data. Container-like data types can be seen as generalised polynomials over their element types. Differential operators act on those polynomials to give notions of “focus” or “cursor”, splitting […]

2021/05/20 There is a glaring gap in data exploration tools. On the one hand, there are spreadsheets, which are easy to use, but are error-prone and limited. On the other hand, there are programmatic tools, which offer unlimited flexibility, but require expert programming skills. Can we get the best from both worlds and build tools […]

We are delighted to welcome Prof. Glynn Winskel, pioneer of semantics of programming languages and theories of concurrency, to the Programming Languages team as Chief Scientist.

Time: Thursday, 29 April 2021, 9:30 Edinburgh time (UTC+1) Abstract: We’ll tour my Nominal techniques Haskell package, which provides easy access to types and type classes with nominal-style binding. Why do you need this?  Because it lets you program and reason on name-like data (e.g. variable symbols, pointers, links), and binding (e.g. name-binding, hiding, locality) at […]

About Huawei Research and Development UK Limited Huawei’s vision is to enhance the lives of humanity and improve the environment by building a fully connected and intelligent world. Huawei has the largest R&D organisation in the world with 80,000 employees in research centres around the globe. In the UK, we already have design centres in […]

Date/Time: 2021/04/08 This talk will overview how to improve your C++ programs using functional techniques, based on Ivan Cukic book ISBN-10(1617293814). C was born as C with Classes, but the addition of Templates and STL, made C++ a multi-paradigm language. The book goes over Functional Programming features included in the latest C++ implementations C++11,C++14 and […]

Efficient gradient descent-style local optimisation algorithms have been studied extensively and applied abundantly throughout the field of deep learning. On the other hand, convergent global optimisation algorithms that never yield an incorrect result — such as branch-and-bound methods — are much less practically available. Optimisation is a core component of supervised machine learning, having broad […]

Abstract String diagrams are becoming the established mathematical language of diagrammatic reasoning, with the mantra of ‘only connectivity matters’: equal terms are represented as isomorphic (or isotopic) diagrams. Unfortunately, when adding more structure to categories in the form of additional axioms, this mantra is lost: we must now consider diagrams up to rewriting. To perform […]

Time: 2021-02-11 09:30-10:30 ((UTC00:00) Edinburgh Video of the talk: https://youtu.be/sMWOQNfYIUw Speaker: James Wood, Strathclyde U Abstract: The metatheory of simple type systems presented using de Bruijn indices is well understood. We know to follow the principle that variable binding is the only interaction between the context and typing rules other than the variable rule. From […]