Ian Stark

Senior Lecturer in Computer Science

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

Email:	Ian.Stark@ed.ac.uk

Phone:	+44 131 650 5143 (Work)
	+44 131 228 4101 (Home)
Fax:	+44 131 651 1426
Office:	Informatics Forum 5.04

Research

Papers · Talks

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

The Continuous π-Calculus: A Process Algebra for Biochemical Modelling. Kwiatkowski and Stark, October 2008. (PDF)
Safety Guarantees from Explicit Resource Management. Aspinall, Maier and Stark, August 2008.
Free-Algebra Models for the π-Calculus. Stark, January 2008.

The Continuous π-Calculus: A Process Algebra for Biochemical Modelling Theoretical Computer Science Seminar, University of Birmingham, February 2010. (Slides)
Reasons to Believe: Digital Evidence to Guarantee Trustworthy Mobile Code. fet 09, Prague, April 2009. (Slides)
Some Hedge Mazes. LFCS lab lunch, March 2009. (Slides, 19M)

Events: FLoC 2010 conferences; ICALP 2010 conference; PCC 2009 workshop; APL 2009 summer school.

Projects

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. He is now working in the Evolutionary Ecology group at ETH Zürich & EAWAG.

Information about studying for a PhD at Edinburgh

Teaching

Current courses (2010/2011)

Past courses

Models and Languages for Computational Systems Biology
Advanced Programming in Java
Language Processing
Individual Programming Project: A µOCCAM compiler
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, Paul-André Melliès, Eugenio Moggi, Andrzej Murawski, Peter O'Hearn, Luke Ong, Andrew Pitts, Don Sannella, Alex Simpson, Perdita Stevens, Glynn Winskel.