I am a Senior Research Fellow (permanent position) in the ULTRA (Logic, Types, and Rewriting) group in the Computer Science Department in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University (more info) in Edinburgh (more info), Scotland (more info).
(The members of the Computer Science department formerly
belonged to the now defunct Computing and Electrical Engineering
Department. The domain cee.hw.ac.uk is now
obsolete; please don't use it anymore.)
I have prepared a number of student project proposals. These proposals can be the basis for student projects from 3 to 9 months in length (e.g., M.Sc. or 4th year CS B.Sc. projects), with appropriate adjustments. If you would like to do something similar to but not the same as one of the projects I have listed, please contact me and we can discuss it.
Some of the student projects that I have supervised have made their results public and they are listed here. All of the software produced by these projects is free (non-enslaved) software, sometimes called "open source" software.
diff program) and patching (like the
line-oriented patch program) XML documents.
There are open positions at Heriot-Watt for Ph.D. students to do research into the theories of logics, types, and rewriting and their applications in reasoning about computer systems and mathematics. See the advertisement for more details.
My research interests are in the applications of advanced type systems and rewriting techniques primarily motivated by issues in the design and implementation of convenient, efficient, scalable, secure, and reliable programming language systems.
I have been involved in the following research efforts.
I have made available the following resources related to my research.
I have been involved in the development of research software, including the following.
I have been involved (other than as an ordinary participant) in the following international scientific meetings.
| E-mail: | Local Part: | jbw |
|---|---|---|
| Domain: | macs.hw.ac.uk | |
| (OpenPGP public key) | ||
| Telephone | (Office): | +44 131 451 3869 |
| (I often work at home, so if I do not answer my office telephone, colleagues (not including students taking modules I am teaching) may try calling me at home.) | ||
| (Home): | +44 131 449 4611 | |
| (Dept. Office): | +44 131 451 3328 | |
| UK Local Time: | 2007-10-10 T 11:36:10+01:00 (Wednesday) | |
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| UK Local Time Zone | (Current): | +01:00 (Offset relative to UTC. This time zone is locally called BST.) |
| (Winter): | +00:00 (Offset relative to UTC. This time zone is locally called BDT.) | |
| (As is the case throughout most of Europe, the summer/winter time-zone change occurs on the last Sunday in March/October at 01:00+00:00.) | ||
| Fax | (Dept. Office): | +44 131 451 3732 |
| (Please notify me by e-mail if you send a fax to the above number so I can know to pick up the fax.) | ||
| (Home): | +44 131 449 4611 | |
| (Please contact me before sending a fax to my home number so I can connect the fax machine to the telephone line.) | ||
| Post: |
School of
Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Heriot-Watt University Riccarton (more info) EDINBURGH EH14 4AS Scotland GREAT BRITAIN |
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| Office: |
EM 161 (Room 1.61, Earl Mountbatten Building)
(As of 2007-08-15, this is building number 3 on this map and between numbers 1 and 3 on this map. Both maps are linked from this web page with directions. It is also building number 2 on this obsolete older map.) |
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Most of the Heriot-Watt Riccarton Campus is quite picturesque. There are many exotic trees, and a wide range of wildlife. One of our staff members, Adrian Hurt, has taken a number of pictures of the wildlife on the campus. I like his pictures of a goose, a number of young cygnets, and a family of swans.
One kind of wildlife is particularly common. The Riccarton campus is overrun by rabbits. In the winter, the Riccarton rabbits seem to have an unusual mode of hibernation. Periodically, the swarms of rabbits seem to suddenly disappear. There is some speculation that at these times the rabbits are beset by armed opponents. Photographic evidence obtained by Adrian shows that the rabbits may be preparing their response.
Adrian has also obtained photographs indicating that our school's new Colin Maclaurin building may be concealing some hidden purpose. It is possible that this has something to do with strange transformations that the Riccarton rabbits have undergone near the Colin Maclaurin building. There are also unholy buses in the vicinity, although it is unclear if this is related.
Alan Sokal's marvelously fun 1996 article Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in the “journal” Social Text begins with the following wry (and technically completely accurate) commentary about the relationship between science and culture:
There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.
For publishing this paper, the editors of Social Text won the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature. The publication of this paper triggered an enormous and wide-ranging debate (with hundreds (probably thousands) of articles) about the deleterious effects of postmodernism (and other movements influenced by postmodernism).
Linus Torvalds has a marvelous rant about how horrible C++ is, where he has this to say:
C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.
You might enjoy reading P. Z. Myers's review of a recent book by classic crackpot Stuart Pivar. (But please don't even think of buying the book! For your amusement, search the web for the phrase “classic crackpot” to learn more about Pivar.) The best part:
The doodles in this book bear absolutely no relationship to anything that goes on in real organisms, but after staring at them for a while, I realized what this book is actually about.
This book is a description of the development and evolution of balloon animals.
It's that bad. This is a book suitable only for use at clown colleges, and even there, I suspect the clowns would tell us that it is impractical, nonsensical, and has no utility in their craft.
“Joe Wells” is also: