BACKGROUND:

Algebraic effects are a way of describing and executing effectful computations by manipulating a syntactic representation of a program. This talk will introduce some of the basic theory of algebraic effects and demonstrate their use in Haskell.

PREPARATION:

Additional materials may be circulated nearer the day, but it will be helpful to have some knowledge of the Haskell language.

SPEAKER:

I am a Reader at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, where I am the Head of the Functional Programming Research Group. My research interests are centred around programming languages, where I have made advances in applications of category theory for giving the semantics of programs and algorithms. In particular, my recent work has been focused on showing the connections between domain specific languages, algebraic effect handlers, and structured recursion schemes.

Previously I was a Lecturer at the University of Bristol in the Theory and Algorithms group. Before that I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, and a Haskell consultant at Well-Typed. I obtained my DPhil from the University of Oxford where I also studied as an undergraduate at Brasenose College.