News & Events

Danvy Speaks on Cutting-Edge Computer Science Research
Seton Hall > News & Events 

Thursday, September 11, 2008
by: Marco T. Morazán, Ph.D.

Olivier Danvy

Famed computer scientist, Olivier Danvy, will deliver an invited talk on Tuesday, September 16 at 4 p.m. in Jubilee Hall, Room 132. His visit is sponsored by Dr. Marco T. Morazán, the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and the College of Arts and Sciences.
 
Olivier Danvy, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark and is interested in all aspects of programming languages, including programming. He received a Ph.D. and a Habilitation in Computer Science from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) in 1986 and 1993, and a D.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Aarhus in 2006. He serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation (formerly LISP and Symbolic Computation) and as associate editor of the Journal of Functional Programming and of the Journal of Computing Science and Engineering. He has authored over 120 peer-reviewed articles and in 2004 was recognized as the most thanked Computer Scientist in a study that included 335,000 publications. He has also supervised 18 Ph.D. students to date.
 
Dr. Danvy will be speaking about Defunctionalization, a program transformation introduced by John Reynolds 25 years ago to "firstify" an interpreter. The goal of this work is to illustrate how defunctionalization is useful in other areas of functional programming than writing interpreters, and to present its left inverse, refunctionalization. Together, defunctionalization and refunctionalization connect the usual first order style of writing programs and the seemingly more complex higher-order style of writing functional programs. This talk will be illustrated by simple and (one hopes) telling examples. This presentation is based on joint work with Lasse R. Nielsen and Kevin Millikin.
 

For more information please contact:
Marco T. Morazán, Ph.D.
973-761-9466
morazanm@shu.edu