Submitted by Jonathan Goddard on Thu, 23/01/2020 - 09:07
Together with Michael Arntzenius (of the University of Birmingham), Dr Neel Krishnaswami has received a Distinguished Paper Award for their research paper at POPL 2020.
The paper presents a new programming language for database queries and program analysis, as well as a new optimization technique for it.
Many problems in computing are solved by collecting a large amount of data, and then writing a "query program" to ask questions about that data.
In order to return answers in a reasonable amount of time, these programs must execute extremely quickly. Traditionally, queries have been made fast by limiting the expressiveness of the query language, but Arntzenius and Krishnaswami's work allows users to write queries in a much more expressive language without sacrificing performance.
POPL (Principles of Programming Languages) is a series of conferences dating back to 1974, and is described by the ACM as "the premier forum for research on programming language design and implementation." The POPL committee selected 6 papers (out of 247 submitted) for a Distinguished Paper Award.
