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At PLaS, we explore fundamental and applied topics in functional and imperative languages, type systems, verification, concurrency, and secure compilation. Our research extends into architectures and systems, including concurrency, relaxed memory, verified compilation, and garbage collection, all connected by shared interests in semantics, type systems, verification, and implementation.
Ultimately, we work to develop and promote the theory and practice of how humanity expresses itself effectively through computation.
Our work builds on a rich heritage of programming languages research, including David Turner, creator of Miranda; Richard Jones, renowned for his seminal work on garbage collection and author of the Garbage Collection Handbook; and Simon Thompson, known for functional programming tools like Wrangler and author of Erlang Programming. We inherit and preserve a supportive research environment.
News
- January 2026 – Mark Batty, Sarah Harris, and Michael Vollmet have received ~£1M funding to continue the development of Rust compiler ports targeting the architectures that feature CHERI protections. The new funding is through partner SCI Semiconductor, who are developing the CHERIoT architecture that features hardware protection against memory safety bugs, together with compartmentalisation features that provide protection for interoperation between software components. The new project will allow the Rust compiler team to grow at Kent over the next three years. The ultimate aim is to provide a programming environment where memory safety errors are caught statically, where possible, and in hardware if necessary. Hardware memory safety protection causes downtime in the case of error, which is preferable to leaking sensitive information, but Rust’s type system can provide an assurance that safe Rust code will not raise these errors.
- September 2024 – Vineet Rajani and Dominic Orchard were awarded a £226K ARIA grant on Graded Modal types for Quantitative Analysis of Higher-Order Probabilistic programs (Grad4HOProb).
- July 2024 – Marco Paviotti and David Castro-Perez have organized the Concurrency Workshop (CW) and S-REPLS 15 that were held at the University of Kent.
- April 2023 – Mark Barry and Vineet Rajani have received a £374,698 EPSRC grant on Safe and secure COncurrent programming for adVancEd aRchiTectures (COVERT).
- March 2023 – David Castro-Perez has received a £162,324 ISFP grant on Mechanised Bisimilarities and Behavioural-typed Processes (MEBI).
- September 2022 – Vineet Rajani received a £160K EPSRC grant on type-based information declassification and its secure compilation (TYPDSEC).
- June 2022 – PhD student Daniel Marshall and PLAS academic Dominic Orchard have won Distinguished Paper Award and Distinguished Artifact Award for their paper “How to Take the Inverse of a Type” at ECOOP 2022 (see Twitter thread).
- May 2022 – Mark Batty, Mike Vollmer, and Simon Cooksey have received a £495k EPSRC grant on Transparent pointer safety: Rust to Lua to OS Components
- April 2021 – Stefan Marr has received a Royal Society Industry Fellowship lasting till 2024 (press release)
- February 2021 – Andy King along with Budi Arief (Security group at Kent) have received funding from VeTSS for their project on Symbolic Computation for Mainstream Verification.
- Stefan Marr has been awarded a Royal Society Industry Fellowship: FastStart: Fast Single-Truth Language Runtimes.
- September 2020 – Congratulations to our PhD student Jack Hughes for winning best paper award (and a €500 prize) at LOPSTR 2020 for his work on Resourceful Program Synthesis with Graded Modal Types joint with his supervisor Dominic.
- September 2020 – Olaf Chitil hosted IFL 2020 (the 32nd iteration of Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages) at the University of Kent (run as a virtual event).
- July 2020 – Stefan Marr has been awarded a New Investigators Award on his project CaMELot: Catching and Mitigating Event-Loop Concurrency Issues.
- June 2020 – Laura Bocchi and Simon Thompson have been awarded funding for their project STARDUST: Session Types for Reliable Distributed Systems (STARDUST).
