Stephanie Weirich

Assistant Professor of Computing and Information Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Pennsylvania

Ph.D. (2002) Computer Science
Cornell University

phone: 215.573.2821
fax: 215.898.0587
email: sweirich at cis.upenn.edu
office: 510 Levine Hall

Quick Links

• My publications (including drafts)
• More information about my research (CV, talks, activities, etc.)
• Penn's Programming Languages group
• Tutorial on using Coq for PL Research at POPL 2008
• Come to the Oregon Summer School
• Submit papers to PCC 2008
  
• Help define the new Haskell standard: Haskell prime wiki

Current Research Projects

• Research statement (updated 9/4/07)
  
  
• Type-directed programming: Defining functions via type information cuts down on boilerplate programming as many operations may be defined once, for all types of data. I and my students have been investigating language support for type-directed programming in a number of contexts.
  
• in Haskell: RepLib: A library for derivable type classes and A Common Library for Generic Programming
  
• in ML:  AspectML (with Geoffrey Washburn, David Walker and Dan Dantas) and InforML
  
• in Java: Type-Directed Java
  
  
• Type inference for advanced type systems: Advanced type system features, such as first-class polymorphism, impredicative polymorphism and generalized algebraic datatypes, do not interact well with the standard algorithms for type inference in modern typed functional languages, such as ML and Haskell.  Simon Peyton Jones, my students Dimitrios Vytiniotis, Geoffrey Washburn and I have been incorporating ideas from Local Type Inference to extend the Glasgow Haskell Compiler with support for these features.
  
  
• Machine assistance for programming languages research:  Designing and proving properties about programming languages is hard, but the proofs themselves are straightforward once you know how to set them up. At the same time, it is all too easy to miss the one little case that ruins the whole "proof". Modern proof assistants, such as Twelf, Coq, and Isabelle are good at expressing this sort of reasoning, but it is hard to know where to start. I've been working with the POPLmark team to issue challenge problems, organize a workshop, explore techniques for reasoning about binding, and develop educational materials about mechanizing programming language metatheory.
  

Current Students

• Brian Aydemir
• Dimitrios Vytiniotis

Graduated Students

• Geoffrey Washburn (Dec. 2007, now at EPFL)

Recent Courses

Programming Languages and Techniques I (CSE/CIS 120)
    [Fall 08] [Spring 08] [Spring 07]
Advanced Topics in Programming Languages (CIS 670/CIS 700):
    [Fall 06] [Spring 06] [Spring 05] [Fall 03] [Fall 02]
Software Foundations (CIS 500):
    [Fall 05] [Fall 04]
Principles of Programming Languages (CSE 340):
    [Spring 04] [Spring 03]

Other courses

Contact Information

office hours: By appointment

postal mail:
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Department of Computer and Information Science
Levine Hall
3330 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389

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Last Modified:  Mar 17, 2008