[Haskell] PhD position in Communicating Transactions at Trinity College Dublin

[Edsko de Vries]

Language Support for Communicating Transactions

A three year PhD position, to start in September 2011, is now
available at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, associated with the
project "Language Support for Communicating Transactions" funded by
the Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship scheme. Three years fees will
be paid at the EU rate and there will be a stipend at the standard HEA
rate. The position is based in the Department of Computer Science at
Trinity College, co-supervised by Matthew Hennessy at Trinity and
Andrew Gordon and Nick Benton at Microsoft Research, Cambridge
England.

The goal of the project is to develop abstract models and programming
support for "communicating transactions" a novel language construct
obtained by dropping the standard isolation requirement from
traditional transactions.  As a result independent transactions can
interfere, or communicate, with each other, which leads to complex
interdependences in the event of failure. The goal of the project is
to construct abstract models for their behaviour and to develop
efficient programming language support for these models.

Specifically the project will extend concurrent Haskell with a
construct for communicating transactions, study the formal semantics
of the extended language, investigate efficient implementation
strategies, and develop useful programming idioms and verification
techniques.

Candidates are expected to have a first-class degree in Computer
Science.  The project will involve language implementation, the
elaboration of formal semantics, and the development of verification
techniques. Consequently the successful candidate will have a broad
range of skills. These should include language implementation skills,
a good knowledge of formal techniques for the specification of
language semantics; experience with logic based verification
techniques is also desirable. Informal preliminary enquiries may be
made to Matthew Hennessy at Trinity College.