Group News

PhD and Master Thesis Completions

Congratulations to Victor Cacciari Miraldo, who successfully defended his thesis titled "Type-safe Generic Differencing of Mutually Recursive Families", and to Wouter Swierstra, his supervisor.

Roger Bosman completed his MSc thesis on Unboxed Function Closures, supervised by Wouter Swierstra and Richard Eisenberg. Roger has recently started a PhD with Tom Schrijvers at the KU Leuven.

Niek Mulleners completed his MSc thesis, Modular Semantics for Algebraic Effects supervised by Wouter Swierstra. From the 1st of September, he has started a PhD in Utrecht under the supervision of Johan Jeuring.

New group members and visitors

• David van Balen started in our group in September. For his PhD, he will be working on the Accelerate project, supervised by Trevor McDonell and Gabriele Keller.
• Jacco Krijnen also started in September, and his PhD is about the verification of smart contract languages, supervised by Wouter Swierstra, Gabriele Keller, and Manuel Chakravarty (IOHK).
• Jaro Reinders is a student from the Technical University Eindhoven who is doing an internship in our group in the first period of this course year.  He is developing a visualization tool for UUAG attribute grammar code. UUAG is a tool that was developed for years in Utrecht and is used in the implementation of, for example, the Helium compiler. He is supervised by Jurriaan Hage.

Project news

• A certifying compiler for smart contracts: in September, we had the kick-off for our project on certified compilation of the on-chain components of Plutus contracts. This project is funded jointly by NWO and IOHK, and we (Jacco Krijnen, Wouter Swierstra, Gabriele Keller) will  be working together with Manuel Chakravarty from IOHK. 
• The iv4XR project aims to build a novel verification and validation technology for XR systems based on techniques from AI to provide learning and reasoning over a virtual world. With this technology XR developers can deploy powerful test agents to automatically explore and test the correct parameters of their virtual worlds as they iteratively develop and refine them. In addition, user experience is an equally important aspect for all XR systems. We will therefore also develop socio-emotional AI to enable test agents to conduct automated assessment of the quality of user experience and parameterization by different demographic and socio economic types, such as male, female, young, and elderly (software repositories)
• The IMPRESS project seeks to explore the use of gamification, i.e., the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-gaming contexts, which has seen successful applications in other domains.
  All gamified interactive content produced by IMPRESS will be provided as free, open and public assets.
   

Recent papers and talks

• Jurriaan Hage and Alejandro Serrano received a most distinguished paper award at ICFP 2020 together with co-authors Dimitrios Vytiniotis and Simon Peyton Jones for their paper A Quick Look At Impredicativity. 
• June 2020: Vedran Kasalica and Anna-Lena Lamprecht presented their paper APE: A Command-Line Tool and API for Automated Workflow Composition at the virtual ICCS 2020 conference. Download link: 
• June 2020: Anna-Lena Lamprecht et al. published the position paper Towards FAIR principles for research software in the Data Science journal. 
• Nov, 2020,. I.S.W.B. Prasetya, M. Voshol, A. Smits et al.  Navigation and Exploration in 3D-Game Automated Play Testing. To appear in the proc. of 11th International Workshop on Automating TEST case Design, Selection and Evaluation, co-located with ESEC/FSE 2020. 
• Oct. 2020,. R. Prada, I.S.W.B. Prasetya, F. Kitefew et al. Agent-based Testing of Extended Reality Systems. In the proc. of IEEE Int. Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) 2020. 
• Oct 2020. I.S.W.B. Prasetya, C.Q.H.D. Leek, R. Oosenburg et al. Can Learning Formal Specification Be Fun? -Experience and Perspective. In the proc. of the Int. Software Testing Education Workshop, co-located with ICST 2020. 
• Sep 2020, I.S.W.B. Prasetya, R. Prada, T.E.J. Vos et al., Intelligent Verification/Validation for Extended Reality Based System, in the Research Project track of the 14th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science. 
• Oct 2020, Saba Ansari, Toward Automated Assessment of User Experience in Extended Reality, in the IEEE Int. Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) 2020. 
• Nov 2020, Wishnu Prasetya with Ivan Martinez, Gordon Fraser, Rui Prada, and Tanja Vos will be giving a tutorial on Gamification Tools for Improving Engagement of Students in Software Engineering Courses, in the 32th IEEE Int. Conf. on Software Engineering Education & Training. 
• October 15th, Jurriaan Hage will be given a tutorial on type inference and type based analysis at the on-line edition of the 2020 International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering.

Software

The work on impredicativity described in A Quick Look At Impredicativity by authors Alejandro Serrano, Jurriaan Hage, Simon Peyton Jones and Dimitrios Vytiniotis is slated for release in GHC version 9.2. The paper itself can be obtained here.

• June 2020: First stable release of APE (Automated Pipeline Explorer).
• Subprojects of the iv4XR (Intelligent Verification for Extended Reality Systems) can be found here. They include our agent-based framework for automated testing, currently still called APLIB (Agent Programming Library). 
• A new release of our parallel Haskell library/EDSL Accelerate is out, courtesy of Trever McDonell. Lots of usability improvements, support for sum types, pattern matching - more information here.

Other News

• Jurriaan Hage will be the PC Chair of the Haskell Symposium in 2021 that will either take place virtually, or in Daejon, South Korea.
• Jurriaan Hage was elected Steering Committee Chair of the IFL Symposia. IFL stands for Implementation and Application of Functional Languages and is a long-running symposium on functional programming that was first organized in 1989.