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
Office:	Informatics Forum 4.15

Diary:	Online calendar
Telephone:	+44 131 651 5663
PGP key:	0xEB58D1AD

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.

PhD Study at Edinburgh

I am always happy to have new PhD students: if you are interested then please send me email and tell me something about your background and research interests.

In 2014 we are opening a new Centre for Doctoral Training in Pervasive Parallelism, with ten fully funded scholarships each year. The centre covers a wide range of theoretical and applied topics, including research on safety and security in programming languages for concurrent and distributed systems of all kinds.

The Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science also offers graduate research positions and PhD scholarships.

Links: Graduate study at Edinburgh; Pervasive Parallelism; Apply for a PhD at LFCS.

Research Projects

REMS: Rigorous Engineering for Mainstream Systems is a collaborative programme between Cambridge, Imperial and Edinburgh funded by the EPSRC to bring together practical systems research — in architectures, operating systems, and networks — with foundational work on mathematical theory — for programming languages, automated reasoning, and verification.
App Guarden: Resilient Application Stores is a research project to develop secure and trustworthy app stores for mobile devices: through user-friendly security policies, automated security analysis, and independently-verifiable digital evidence.
CerCo: Certified Complexity was a three-year collaborative project with research groups in Bologna and Paris to build a verified C compiler that provides cycle-precise execution costs for an embedded microcontroller.
Proof-Carrying Code: The European Mobius consortium was a four-year 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.

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 has been working in Switzerland on resource ecology and host-parasite co-evolution, most recently at the University of Neuchâtel Institute of Biology.

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

Teaching

Current courses (2013/2014)

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, Marek Kwiatkowski, Paul-André Melliès, Eugenio Moggi, Andrzej Murawski, Peter O'Hearn, Luke Ong, Andrew Pitts, Don Sannella, Alex Simpson, Perdita Stevens, Glynn Winskel.