Dominic Orchard

Research website

Dominic's research primarily focusses on the theory and practice of programming languages, particular type systems, semantics, analysis, and verification. 

I belong to the following research groups:

• Programming Languages and Systems Group

I am also a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute.

My research primarily focusses on the theory and practice of programming languages, particular type systems, semantics, analysis, and verification. 

I have served/am serving on the following Programme Committees: PADL 2021 (co-chair), TyDe 2021 (co-chair), ICFP 2020 ERC, PLACES 2019, LOLA 2019, PPDP 2019, POPL 2019, IFL 2018, TyDe 2018, BEAT 2019, ICE 2018. I am co-chairing PLACES 2019.    

Main projects

• Granule - Advanced type systems for verification of data treated as a resoruce.
• CamFort - Lightweight verification of scientific computing models

Broadly I am interested in the intersection between logic, semantics, and types.

I have co-authored several papers introducing and developing the notion of coeffectful program behaviour (ICFP 2016, ICFP 2014, ICALP 2013). Coeffects are program behaviours which "consume" the execution context, e.g., variables, hardware resources, access policies, library versions, implicit parameters. Coeffect analyses and type theories capture a program's requirements on the execution environment. For example, a type theory corresponding to Bounded Linear Logic is a coeffect system which allows fine-grained control over variable usage.

I am also interested in applying results from programming language research to computational science, in particular for program verification. I am Co-Investigator on the project CamFort: Automated evolution and verification of computational science models joint with the University of Cambridge

I am currently teaching on the following courses:

• COMP661 - Theory and Practice of Concurrency
• COMP583- Introduction to Programming and the Web
• COMP545 - Functional Programming

I also supervise projects for CO600 and CO620, so please get in touch if you would like to discuss an idea. Details of my past teaching can be found here.