Dr Jan de Muijnck-Hughes
- Research Associate (School of Computing Science)
telephone:
0141 330 5456
email:
Jan.DeMuijnck-Hughes@glasgow.ac.uk
School of Computing Science, F132, 18 Lilybank Gardens
Biography
I am a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the School of Computing at the University of Glasgow, where I am a member of the Glasgow Parallelism Group (GPG) as part of the Glasgow Systems Section (GLASS). I maintain strong links with the Formal Methods Research Group in Formal Analysis, Theory & Algorithms (FATA) Section through membership of the Programming Languages (PL) Theme.
My core role at Glasgow is to investigate the construction and application of structural and behavioural type-systems for hardware design languages. My other research interests are in the general type-driven development of systems using dependent types, session types, and algebraic effect handlers.
Before I came to Glasgow I was a Research Fellow (and Teaching Fellow) at the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. I completed both my PhD and undergraduate degree at the University of St Andrews, and in between these degrees I was a Kerckhoffs Master student at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Research interests
Generally speaking my research interests involve making Systems Engineering more TyDe: Type-Driven. Today's systems will utilise a specification that is separate from the implementation, and their deployment requires that we verify that implementations adhere to specifications through external processes. There is a fundamental separation-of-concerns between system: specification—by domain experts; verification—by verification experts; creation—by software engineers; use—by end users; and certification—by auditors. Such a disconnect leads to issues over system security and safety by allowing errors to be present at various points during a system's lifecycle.
I am interested in how we can combine state-of-the-art advances in programming language theory, namely type-systems & functional programming, and use these advances to fundamentally change the way we engineer systems and interlink our engineering concerns together. I believe that if we are to ever build trustworthy systems, we must make machine checkable specifications an intrinsic aspect of the system through adoption of type-driven approaches.
By doing so we can: reduce mismatches between a system’s specification and implementation; increase productivity of system creation and verification; and fundamentally enhance system trustworthiness. This will impact both Society and The Economy by guaranteeing that our systems are trustworthy because our engineering practises are themselves: Type Driven!
Specifically, I am interested in bettering system design and construction through applications of:
- functional programming;
- formal verification;
- mathematically informed programming;
- dependent types;
- sub-structural typing (quantitative, resource-dependent, session); and
- algebraic effect handlers.
There are more topics (Privacy and Cryptography) that I am interested in, but the above keeps me busy for now!
Grants
AppControl: Enforcing Application Behaviour through Type-Based Constraints (EPSRC, 2020-2024 EP/V000462/1) Researcher Co Investigator with Prof. Wim Vanderbauwhede as PI and others.
Teaching
2020-2021
- CS4025P: Individual Project
- Supervisor to two Level 4 Students.
2019-2020
- CS4025P: Individual Project
- Supervisor to one Level 4 Student.
2018-2019
- CS4025P: Individual Project
- Supervisor to two Level 4 Students.
- CS4021: Functional Programming with Haskell
- Co-Lecturer, and tutor on course’s corresponding MOOC.
2017-2018
- CS4021: Functional Programming with Haskell
- Co-Lecturer, and tutor on course’s corresponding MOOC.
- CS4062: Cyber Security Fundamentals
- Co-Lecturer