Dr. Tristan Allwood

First Year Teaching Fellow in the Department of Computing, Imperial College, London

Email me at tristan.allwood@imperial.ac.uk, tweet me on @TotallyToRA, read my blog, fork some of my code, or find me on linked in.

First Year Coordinator

The First Year Noticeboard can be found online.

Research Interests

My PhD was supervised by Prof. Susan Eisenbach. Prof. Sophia Drossopoulou also provided secondary supervision.

My research interests have gravitated around Haskell programming, with a theme of Random Test Generation.

My publications are available online, from the ACM and from the dblp.

I am part of the SLURP research group. The calendar for our meetings is available online.

Irulan: Random Black Box Testing for Haskell

Automatic Crash finder / black box testing for Haskell using the GHC API. Lecturer Cristian Cadar also mentored me on this project.

• PhD Thesis describing Irulan: [pdf]
• Paper, Sources, More details: available online
• Irulan: Automatic Crash Testing using the GHC API: slides. AngloHaskelll, 7th August, '09

Finding the Needle: Stack Traces for GHC

I undertook a 3 month internship at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, under Simon Peyton Jones. During this time I developed a prototype stack-trace facility for GHC.

• GHC Sources with Patch Applied: download (88mb) README.
• Patches, and papers and slides: available online. (See the README file).
• Finding the Needle: Stack Traces for GHC: paper video slides (.odp) slides (.pdf). Haskell Symposium, 3rd September '09.

CLASE: Cursor Library for a Structured Editor

I started trying to make a structured editor for an extended lambda calculus. As part of that project, I developed a practically useful zipper-like library/tooling that used interesting GHC features (Type Families, GADTs).

• Sources and all papers and slides: available online. (See the README file).
• Strengthening the Zipper: paper slides. LDTA, 28th March, '09.
• Cursor Library for a Structured Editor (Tool Demo): video paper. Haskell Symposium, 25th September '08
• CLASE: slides audio. AngloHaskell, 8th August, '08

Tickling Java With a Feather

I Used FeatherWeight Java to define a space of programs and act as a type checking oracle. I then generated FJ programs and using them to check a Java compiler agrees with the FJ type checker.

This work was then built upon by a Prize winning student group project.

• REACTOR: online. Prize winning student group project that took this work further.
• Code and code coverage results: available online.
• Tickling Java With a Feather: paper slides LDTA, 5th April, '08

Haskell 'Games'

At the start of my PhD, myself and Matthew Sackman looked at, and prototyped some OpenGL games/hacks using Haskell.

• 'Games' in Haskell: video, slides. Matthew Sackman and myself speaking about our experiences of learning Haskell and OpenGL and trying to write games. London Haskell User Group, 20th September '07
• The Haskell Motorcycle Diaries: slides. Talk about Haskell and early demo of our Haskell game attempt. Imperial College's 'Games and Media Event' (GaME), 17th May, 2007

Previous Teaching

Advanced Haskell

Optional autumn term programming lectures for 1st years during the first term. Topics over the last couple of years have included:

• Using the GHC toolchain (GHC, GHCi, GHCi debugger, hpc)
• Interesting algorithms/problems and solutions in Haskell: Stern Brocot, memoized Fibonacci, 3 and 4 tower Hanoi
• Haskell idioms: Monoids, Functors, Monads
• Fingertrees
• Concurrency: STM
• A smidgin of OpenGL to write a simple game (e.g. breakout).

Advanced Java Lectures

I have previously taught and assisted teaching these optional Spring term lectures for first years. Topics included:

• Simple neural networks
• Ant swarm simulation
• Inner classes, anonymous classes
• Networking and Distribution with sockets, serializable and RMI
• Java 5 features: wildcards, wildcard bounds, generic type intersections, enums and varargs
• Annotations and Reflection

Undergraduate Projects

Fleece

4th Year MEng Project Report. About pluggable, iterative type checking for dynamic programming languages.

Kevlar

3rd Year MEng Group Project Report. Prize-winning project about a user friendly graphical system shell written in Java.

Miscellaneous

I am the maintainer and co-developer of the current version of the programming language Kenya.

I was awarded the Computing Departmental Graduate Teaching Assistant award in 2010 for the advanced Haskell and Java courses I helped organise. The citation.

Previous website (with various Java applets on it)