In this episode, me and Eric Bond have a great conversation with Dan R. Ghica, a professor at Birmingham University and Director of the Programming Language Research Lab of the Huaweii Research Centre Edinburgh. We talk about his work on both institutions, which includes topics such as Category Theory, String Diagrams, and Game Semantics. We also briefly discuss the current publication process of our field and entertain some thoughts on how to make it better. Finally, we touch on more personal topics such as his views about Elegance, making an insightful counterpoint to Conal’s opinions on Denotational Semantics vs. Operational Semantics.

Links

• Dan’s Twitter: @danghica
• Dan’s Website
• Job advert for Huawei positions

Talks and Lectures

• Dan’s talk on Syntactic Trinitarianism (terms, graphs, diagrams)
• Dan’s talk on a similar, more semantics-oriented talk at TERMGRAPH
• Dan’s OPLSS course on (denotational) game semantics
• Game semantics lectures

Papers

• Paper on string diagrams and their applications to reverse automatic differentiation (long paper, part of it to appear in FSCD 2020)
• Paper on automatic differentiation and string diagrams
• Paper on effect handlers
• Paper on optimisation with constructive reals
• Paper on digital circuits and string diagrams
• Paper on functorial boxes for string diagrams
• A Game semantics paper mentioned during the conversation
• Decidability via game semantics
• Landmark paper on undecidability of observational equivalence

Other Links

• Penrose book
• Book on type-level string diagrams
• Proof assistant for higher categories
• The Programming Journal
• Midlands Graduate School