liamoc.net – Dr. Liam O’Connor

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I am Liam O’Connor, a Lecturer in Programming Languages for Trustworthy Systems for LFCS at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. I specialise in programming languages and type systems, verification, formal methods, and concurrency. Until July 2024 I am also a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University School of Computing, after which time I intend to take a permanent position there.

At Edinburgh, I teach the Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science course, along with a handful of tutorials for Informatics 1A and Discrete Mathematics. I also (with Rob van Glabbeek) co-teach our flagship course on concurrency theory, Modelling Concurrent Systems. In my previous posting at the University of New South Wales I taught several courses ranging from theory of programming languages to concurrency to formal methods. I work regularly in and on the Haskell programming language and the Agda proof assistant. Much of my research work involves these languages. I am the Social Media Editor of the Journal of Functional Programming, and a Member-at-Large of the Steering Committee of TyDe. I am also the Publicity Chair of the Scottish Programming Languages Institute.

I am the designer of the Holbert educational proof assistant.

I am also the lead researcher for the Quickstrom testing tool. This project is joint work with Oskar Wickström and my PhD student Rayhana Amjad (with Rob van Glabbeek as secondary supervisor).

I am also co-supervising a PhD student, Tudor Ferariu, on verification of blockchain smart contracts with Phil Wadler. I am also second supervisor to Mathieu Fehr, whose primary supervisor is Tobias Grosser.

Originally part of my doctorate and now as ongoing research work, I designed the Cogent programming language, and I remain a contributor to its associated verification framework and compiler. This project is part of the long-term vision of the Trustworthy Systems team (formerly at CSIRO Data61), to reduce the cost and effort required to make formally verified systems. In the past I have also worked with the Trustworthy Systems team on the l4.verified project and tools for the Isabelle theorem prover. I have also been affiliated with the DPH and Accelerate projects as my PhD supervisor was Gabriele Keller.

In my free time, I like to collect and tinker on old and obsolete computers. Please get in touch with me if you want to collaborate on retro computing projects, donate a computer, or visit to see my collection of old computers.

This contains my blog as well as a publication list, and other miscellany.

Posts

Dargent (and Cogent) at POPL - 24th June 2023
Holbert and Cogent at SPLASH - 15th December 2022
Quickstrom at PLDI - 18th August 2022

…or you can find more in the archives.

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