About

I’m Simon, and I’m currently a PhD student in the Centre for Doctoral Training in Pervasive Parallelism at the University of Edinburgh.

I work on typed, communication-centric functional programming languages. Part of my PhD research has focused on providing a formal basis for type-parameterised actors, and relating them to typed channels. Some of the results can be found in Mixing Metaphors: Actors as Channels and Channels as Actors.

I’m currently working with session types on the ABCD project, supervised by Sam Lindley and Philip Wadler. I am looking at interesting language features and abstractions to make it easier to write programs in functional languages with session types, mainly in the context of the Links programming language. Currently, I am extending Links to allow the creation of distributed web applications using session-typed channels, and designing and implementing a system for exception handling.

More generally, my research interests include programming languages, session types, dependent types, and functional programming.

In the past, I have been an intern at IntelliFactory, where I worked on WebSharper UI.Next. I did my MSc by Research at the University of Edinburgh, and my BSc at the University of St Andrews.

Contact

Feel free to get in touch: you can reach me at simon.fowler -at- ed.ac.uk or simon -at- simonjf.com.

Recent Blog Posts

• Session types in programming languages—a collection of implementations

Research

Conference and Workshop Papers

• Fowler, S., Lindley, S., and Wadler, P. Mixing Metaphors: Actors as Channels and Channels as Actors. ECOOP 2017.
  • LIPIcs
  • Long version
• Fowler, S. An Erlang Implementation of Multiparty Session Actors. ICE 2016.
  • EPTCS
• Fowler, S., Denuziere, L., Granicz, A. Reactive Single-Page Applications with Dynamic Dataflow. PADL 2015.
  • Springer
• Fowler, S. and Brady, E. Dependent Types for Safe and Secure Web Programming. IFL 2013.
  • ACM

Dissertations and Project Reports

• Monitoring Erlang/OTP Applications using Multiparty Session Types. MSc by Research Thesis, University of Edinburgh; 2015.

• Verified Networking using Dependent Types. BSc Project Report, University of St Andrews; 2014.

Miscellaneous

• First-class Distributed Session Types, ICFP Student Research Competition, 2nd Place (Graduate Category)
  • Poster
  • Extended Abstract

Events

• Scottish Programming Languages Seminar (SPLS), 11th October 2017 (co-organised with Craig McLaughlin)
• Scottish Programming Languages Seminar (SPLS), 21st October 2015, (co-organised with Sam Lindley and James McKinna)