ICSA Faculty Talk - 25/03/2021

Title: Half-time at Heterogeneous Thinking 

Abstract: Half way through a 5-year fellowship is a good time to take stock; examining the initial aims and the actual directions followed. The key idea was to match rapidly evolving specialized hardware to ever-growing legacy software with as little human involvement as possible.  While the aim remains the same, the approaches have gone awol.

Constraint-based program analysis and idiom matching have mutated into program synthesis, code embeddings and most recently neural machine translation. In this talk I will try to provide both high level motivation and pointers to new areas of research. As a final promise, in these zoom-laden times, the talk will be no more  than 30 minutes!

Bio: Michael O'Boyle has been here a long-time - arriving in 1997 from Manchester where he gained his PhD in 1992. He has the good fortune to be an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow, supported by the hard-work of his PhDs and RAs. His longterm research goal is to automate compilation and systems design.