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Thorsten says

The next Fun in The Afternoon seminar will be definitely be on Tuesday, 5th May in Nottingham (Jubilee campus). Please put this into your calendars.

I'll send out more details (schedule, abstracts) soon. The expected start time for talks is 1:45pm in C60, 2nd floor, CS building, Jubilee campus, building 4 on this map.

Sandwich lunch is at 12pm in the Hub adjacent to the Functional Programming Lab, ground floor in the same building. Sandwiches can be acquired in the Exchange Building next door (building 2).

I'd like to have a rough idea how many people are coming for coffee and for the restaurant (‘The Taste of India’). Hence, if you plan to come, please send me a short email (txa at cs dot nott dot u-no-wot) with the subject Fun in Nottingham and please state whether you are coming for the curry.

Location

The ninth Fun in the Afternoon will be held in room C60, 2nd floor, Computer Science building, on the Jubilee Campus of the University of Nottingham. Nottingham is centrally located in the UK, and is easily reachable by all forms of transport. For travel advice see here.

All the locations are marked in this map.

Schedule

12.00 - 13.45 Lunch: bring your own sandwiches to the Hub
13.45Meet in C60
14.00 - 14.45 Fun with type functions
Simon Peyton Jones, Microsoft Research, Cambridge
14.45 - 15.00 Break
15.00 - 15.30 Crafting a Calculation for Suffix Sorting
Richard Bird, University of Oxford
15.30 - 16.00 Coffee
16.00 - 16.30 The Quantum IO Monad
Alexander Green, University of Nottingham
16.30 - 16.45 Towards a Demonstrably Correct Compiler for Ada 95
Chris Nettleton, XGC Technology
16.45 - 17.15 Slicing It: indexed containers in Haskell
Conor McBride, University of Strathclyde
17.30 - 18.45 Pub   ‘The Three Wheatsheaves’
19.00 Dinner   ‘The Taste of India’

Abstracts Alphabetically by Author

  • Crafting a Calculation for Suffix Sorting
    Richard Bird, University of Oxford

    Sorting the tails of a list is a problem that is needed in the Burrows-Wheeler method of data compression. In this talk we highlight the main steps of a calculation that leads to a fast method for sorting tails.

  • The Quantum IO Monad
    Alexander Green, University of Nottingham

    The Quantum IO monad is a purely functional interface to quantum programming implemented as a Haskell library, whilst also providing a constructive semantics of quantum programming. The QIO monad separates reversible (i.e. unitary) and irreversible (i.e. probabilistic) computations and provides a reversible let operation, allowing us to use ancillas (auxiliary qubits) in a modular fashion. I shall give an introduction to the QIO monad and examples of some quantum algorithms written in QIO. These QIO programs can be simulated either by calculating a probability distribution or by embedding them into the IO monad using the random number generator.

  • Slicing It: indexed containers in Haskell
    Conor McBride, University of Strathclyde

    With the magic words ‘1, 2, 4, 8, time to exponentiate!’, I shall explore the expressivity of a class of type constructors whose kinds take the form ({ι}→∗)→({ο}→∗), where {τ} lifts type τ so that its values can index types. These things have a suitable notion of map and are also closed under fixpoints equipped with fold and unfold. They admit a standardized presentation of mutually recursive GADTs. The fact that their kinds aren't implemented yet is at worst a minor inconvenience.

  • Fun with type functions
    Simon Peyton Jones, Microsoft Research, Cambridge

    As many of you will know, we've recently extended GHC with type-level functions. This talk, originally prepared for Tony Hoare's 75th Birthday Celebration, is a programmer's eye view of what you can do with the new expressiveness.