Ian Stark

Senior Lecturer in Computer Science
Informatics Director of Teaching

Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science
School of Informatics
The University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh EH8 9AB, Scotland

Email:	Ian.Stark@ed.ac.uk
	inf-dot@ed.ac.uk

Phone:	+44 131 650 5143
Office:	Informatics Forum 5.04
	Appleton Tower 4.09
Diary:	Online calendar

Research

Papers · Talks

My research is on mathematical models for programming languages and concurrent systems; in particular reasoning about name generation and secure mobile code. Below are some papers, talks and events; for more follow the links above.

On Executable Models of Molecular Evolution. Kwiatkowski and Stark, June 2011. (PDF)
Safety Guarantees from Explicit Resource Management. Aspinall, Maier and Stark, August 2008.
Free-Algebra Models for the π-Calculus. Stark, January 2008.

Exploring Variation in Biochemical Pathways with Continuous pi. SynthSys, University of Edinburgh, June 2012. (Slides)
Reasons to Believe: Digital Evidence to Guarantee Trustworthy Mobile Code. fet 09, Prague, April 2009. (Slides)
Webquines, The Collatz Graph and a Weightless Website. LFCS lab lunch, February 2011. (Slides, Pirate, Chess)

Events: Robin Milner Symposium; ESOP 2012 conference; FLoC 2010 conferences.

Projects

CerCo: Certified Complexity is a collaborative project with research groups in Bologna and Paris building a verified C compiler that provides cycle-precise execution costs for an embedded microcontroller.
Proof-Carrying Code: The European Mobius consortium was a project to enable proof-carrying code for Java on mobile devices. This talk and poster summarize the work; you can also download a more technical overview. See this flyer for an overview of earlier work in the LFCS Mobility and Security group on proof-carrying Java bytecode.
Mathematical Models for Concurrent and Mobile Code
Process Algebras in Systems Biology
Names, State and the nu-Calculus

Students

Chris Banks is working on modal logic for the continuous π-calculus, a process algebra for modelling behaviour and variation in biomolecular systems.

Marek Kwiatkowski successfully defended his PhD thesis, A formal computational framework for the study of molecular evolution, in October 2010. Since then he's been working in the Evolutionary Ecology group at ETH Zürich & EAWAG.

Previously, I was principal PhD supervisor for Uli Schöpp (now at LMU in Munich), Sam Lindley (at Strathclyde), and Tom Chothia (lecturing at Birmingham).

If you are interested in studying for a PhD at LFCS, then follow the links below. If you would like to do this with me, please send me email about your background and interests.

Link: Information about studying for a PhD at Edinburgh; Application page for LFCS.

Teaching

Current courses (2012/2013)

Informatics 1: Data & Analysis

I am presently Informatics Director of Teaching.

Informatics Teaching Organisation

Past courses

Computer Literacy: Algorithms and Programs
Models of Computation
Semantics of Computation
Domain Theory
Advances in Semantics

Spider Food

Subjects: mathematical logic, category theory, type theory, principles of programming languages, denotational semantics, operational semantics, domain theory, game semantics, functional programming, Standard ML, Java, proof-carrying code, process calculi, pi-calculus, systems biology, nu-calculus, reasoning with names.

People: David Aspinall, Nick Benton, Lennart Beringer, Gavin Bierman, Julian Bradfield, Luca Cattani, James Cheney, Juliusz Chroboczek, Adriana Compagnoni, Vincent Danos, Marcelo Fiore, Dan Ghica, Stephen Gilmore, Andrew Gordon, Jane Hillston, Martin Hofmann, Andrew Kennedy, Marek Kwiatkowski, Paul-André Melliès, Eugenio Moggi, Andrzej Murawski, Peter O'Hearn, Luke Ong, Andrew Pitts, Don Sannella, Alex Simpson, Perdita Stevens, Glynn Winskel.