About

I’m currently a Research Software Engineer on the Skye Project at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, working with James Cheney.

Up until the end of 2018, I was a PhD student in the Centre for Doctoral Training in Pervasive Parallelism at the University of Edinburgh. I submitted my PhD thesis in December 2018, which concentrated on typed, communication-centric functional programming languages. I am due to defend in March 2019. Part of my PhD involved working with session types on the ABCD project, supervised by Sam Lindley and Philip Wadler.

More generally, my research interests centre around typed functional programming languages, in particular functional approaches to concurrency and web programming.

Previously, I was an intern at OCaml Labs where I compiled WebAssembly to the OCaml Backend. Before that, I was an intern at IntelliFactory, where I worked on WebSharper UI. 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 News

• (21st January 2019): I will be serving on the OOPSLA 2019 Artifact Evaluation Committee.
• (4th January 2019): New job! I’ll be starting as a Research Software Engineer on the Skye project.
• (9th October 2018): Session Types without Tiers has been conditionally accepted to appear at POPL’19!
• (24th September 2018): I will be serving on the Programme Committee for PLACES 2019. Please consider submitting a paper!
• (27th August 2018): New blog post! cmm_of_wasm: From WebAssembly to Native Code via the OCaml Backend

Recent Blog Posts

• My First Artifact: An author’s perspective on the POPL’19 Artifact Evaluation process
• cmm_of_wasm: From WebAssembly to Native Code via the OCaml Backend
• Session types in programming languages—a collection of implementations

Research

Events

• OOPSLA 2019 (Artifact Evaluation Committee)
• PLACES 2019 (Programme Committee)
• 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)

Publications

• Fowler, S., Lindley, S., Morris, J. G., and Decova, S. Exceptional Asynchronous Session Types: Session Types without Tiers. PACMPL 3(POPL), 2019.
  • ACM
  • Long version
• 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

Theses 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