Ohad's Research - Home

Contact

Office 3.47
Informatics Forum
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
10 Crichton Street
Edinburgh EH8 9AB
Tel: +44 (0)131 (6) 50 2960
Post: ohad.kammar@ed.ac.uk


To schedule an appointment, consult my calendar.
profile

Current projects

I currently hold a Royal Society University Research Fellowship on effectful theories of programming languages: models, abstractions, validation, and axiomatics. Current and former project members are Kasia Marek, Justus Matthiesen, James McKinna, Philip Saville, and Craig McLaughlin.

I am a co-investigator on differentiable probabilistic programming semantics, other project members are Luke Ong, Sam Staton, Matthijs Vákár, Maria I. Gorinova, and Jesse Sigal, thanks to Facebook Research. The project is co-ordinated with Erik Meijer, Satish Chandra at Facebook.

I am also involved with Ehud Lamm’s Conceptual Biology Lab.

Past projects

Research interests

  • Applied mathematics
    • Category theory
    • Logic
      • Ordinal notation systems
    • Universal algebra
  • Programming language theory
    • Semantics, in particular denotational semantics
    • Expressivity
    • Polymorphism
      • Value restriction
    • Computational effects
      • Effect type systems
      • Effect handlers
      • Delimited control
      • Monadic reflection
    • Domain theory
      • Axiomatisation
      • Probabilistic powerdomains
      • Jung-Tix problem
    • Probabilistic programming
      • Semantics
      • Structuring generative models
      • Variational inference and kernel methods
    • Concurrency
      • Event structures
      • Relaxed behaviour
      • Trace semantics
    • Access control
    • Staging and metaprogramming
      • Partially-static data structures
      • Reflection
  • Conceptual biology
    • Coevolution
    • Drift
    • The Baldwin effect

Publications and preprints (abstracts)

Teaching

I supervise UG4/MInf and MSc projects in the School of Informatics. Please get in touch if you’d like to explore a self-proposed project involving some of my research interests.

See my teaching page for more information about:

Talks (abstracts)

Reports (abstracts)

Upcoming gigs

Community service

2024

  • PC member, Thirty-Ninth Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS), which will take place in Tallinn (Estonia), July, 2024. Submit a paper!.

  • PC member, POPL Student Research Competition, which will take place in London (England), January, 2024. Submit an entry!

2023

2022

2020

  • Sam Staton succeeded, where I failed, to liberated Johan Joss’s PhD thesis Algorithmisches Differenzierens from the trees. This effort was inspired by a talk given by Michele Pagani.

  • Liberated Rod Burstall’s Writing search algorithms in functional form from the trees. This deed was made possible with the kind help of Daniel Hillerström.
    Full citation:
    Burstall, R.M.: Writing search algorithms in functional form. In: Michie, D. (ed.) Machine Intelligence, vol. 3, pp. 373–385. Edinburgh University Press (1968).
    The original copy did not have a copyright notice. If you are aware of this copy infringing on a copyright, please get in touch.

  • PC member, 5th International Conference on Formal Structures for Computation and Deduction (FSCD 2020), which will take place in Paris (France), June/July, 2020. Submit a paper!

  • PC Co-chair, Languages for Inference (LAFI, né PPS), with Dougal Maclaurin. Submit a talk proposal!

  • PC member, ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Langages (POPL 2020). Submit a paper!

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015 - 2018

2014

2013

2011

Media presence

Consultancy services

I provide private consultancy services at a limited capacity, separate from my role at the University. I am also able to offer more extensive consultancy services through the University.