Luca Cardelli Principal Researcher

Luca Cardelli was born in Montecatini Terme, Italy, studied at the University of Pisa (until 1979), and has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh (1982). He worked at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, from 1982 to 1985, and at Digital Equipment Corporation, Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, from 1985 to 1997, before assuming his current position at Microsoft Research, in Cambridge UK.

His main interests are in type theory and operational semantics, mostly for applications to language design, semantics, and implementation. He implemented the first compiler for ML (the most popular typed functional language), was a member of the Modula-3 design committee, and has designed a few experimental languages, of which the latest are Obliq: a distributed higher-order scripting language, and Polyphonic C#, a distributed extension of C#. His more protracted research activity has been in establishing the semantic and type-theoretic foundations of object-oriented languages, resulting in the 1996 book "A Theory of Objects" with Martin Abadi. More recently he has focused on modeling global and mobile computation, via the Ambient Calculus and on Spatial Logics, which indirectly led to a current interest in Systems Biology.

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Selected Publications