Keynotes

Optimizing the unoptimizable

Leszek Swirski, Google

Tuesday 26th, 2PM

A whirlwind tour through the history and state-of-the-art of JavaScript execution and optimization, with a focus on the V8 engine used by Chrome and Node.js, and how a 10-day prototype became one of the most important programming languages in the world.

About Leszek:

Leszek Swirski has been a software engineer at Google for two years, first in California, now in London, working on the performance of the Android camera and the V8 Javascript engine.

Before joining Google, Leszek did a PhD in the University of Cambridge, researching gaze estimation (a.k.a. eye tracking) on stereoscopic (a.k.a. “3D”) displays.

How to Write a Great Research Paper

Simon Peyton Jones, Microsoft Research

Wednesday 27th, 2PM

Writing papers is a core research skill. Writing is not just a way to report on great research; it’s a way to do great research. Yet many papers are so badly written that, even if they describe excellent work, the work has much less impact than it should. In this talk I’ll give you seven simple, actionable guidelines that will, I hope, help you to write better papers, and have more fun at the same time.

About Simon:

Simon Peyton Jones, FRS, graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London, and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University, before moving to Microsoft Research (Cambridge) in 1998.

Simon’s main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages. He is particularly motivated by direct application of principled theory to practical language design and implementation — that is one reason he loves functional programming so much.

Simon is chair of Computing at School, the grass-roots organisation that was at the epicentre of the 2014 reform of the English computing curriculum.