index.html
changeset 2 f329c1f3b365
parent 1 9e036cad8654
child 3 60f6cd4991ad
equal deleted inserted replaced
1:9e036cad8654 2:f329c1f3b365
     1 <html> 
     1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
     2 <head>
     2 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
     3  <title>
     3 <HEAD>
     4  Minimal HTML Document
     4 <TITLE>Homepage of Christian Urban</TITLE>
     5  </title>
     5 <BASE HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/">
     6  </head> 
     6 </HEAD>
     7 <body>
     7 
     8 Test
     8 <BODY TEXT="#000000" 
     9  </body> 
     9       BGCOLOR="#4169E1" 
    10 </html>
    10       LINK="#0000EF" 
       
    11       VLINK="#51188E" 
       
    12       ALINK="#FF0000">
       
    13 
       
    14 <TABLE WIDTH="100%" 
       
    15        BGCOLOR="#4169E1" 
       
    16        BORDER="0"   
       
    17        FRAME="border"  
       
    18        CELLPADDING="10"     
       
    19        CELLSPACING="2"
       
    20        RULES="all">
       
    21 
       
    22 <!-- left column -->
       
    23 <TR>
       
    24 <TD BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" 
       
    25     WIDTH="24%" 
       
    26     VALIGN="TOP" 
       
    27     ROWSPAN="8">
       
    28 
       
    29 <B>Links</B><BR>
       
    30 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/index.html">Home</A><BR>
       
    31 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/publications.html">Publications</A><BR>
       
    32 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/teaching.html">Teaching</A><BR>
       
    33 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/travelling.html">Recent Talks</A><BR>
       
    34 <A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/">My Research Group</A>
       
    35 <BR>
       
    36 <BR>
       
    37 
       
    38 <B>Handy Information</B><BR>
       
    39 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/logic.html">People in Logic</A><BR> 
       
    40 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/programming.html">Programming Languages</A><BR> 
       
    41 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/misc.html">Miscellaneous</A>
       
    42 <BR><BR>
       
    43 
       
    44 <A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/">
       
    45 <IMG SRC="ribbon.gif" ALT="" style="border-width: 0px;" align="left"></A>
       
    46 </TD>
       
    47 
       
    48 
       
    49 
       
    50 <!-- right column -->
       
    51 <TD BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" WIDTH="75%">
       
    52 <A NAME="Home"></A>
       
    53 <TABLE>
       
    54 <TR>
       
    55 <TD WIDTH="75%">
       
    56 <H1>Christian Urban </H1>
       
    57 
       
    58 <B>E-mail</B> 
       
    59 urbanc <I>at</I> in tum de<BR>
       
    60 <BR>
       
    61 
       
    62 <B>Address</B> 
       
    63 <A HREF="http://www.in.tum.de/en.html">Institute for Computer Science</A> 
       
    64 at the TU Munich (IV), Boltzmannstrasse 3, D-85748 Garching, Germany. 
       
    65 <BR><BR>
       
    66 
       
    67 <B>Fax</B> +49 89 289 17307 
       
    68 </TD>
       
    69 <TD align="right" valign="top"> 
       
    70 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/picture-small.jpg"><IMG ALT="" SRC="picture-small.jpg" align="top"></A>
       
    71 </TD>
       
    72 </TR>
       
    73 </TABLE>
       
    74 <p>
       
    75 <IMG SRC="new.gif" ALT="" style="" align="left"><A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/activities/idp" target="_top">Isabelle Documentation Project</A> (contains now a draft of a 200-page tutorial on Isabelle programming)<BR>
       
    76 </TD>
       
    77 </TR>
       
    78 
       
    79 <TR>
       
    80 <TD BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" WIDTH="75%">
       
    81 <B>Current Position</B> 
       
    82 I have been awarded an 
       
    83 <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether">Emmy-Noether</A> 
       
    84 <A HREF="http://www.dfg.de/en/research_funding/programmes/individual/emmy_noether/in_brief/index.html">fellowship</A>
       
    85 to head an independent <A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/">research group</A> in 
       
    86 the Computer Science Department at the 
       
    87 <A HREF="http://www.in.tum.de/en.html">TU Munich</A>. This group co-operates
       
    88 with the <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/proj/theoremprov/group.html">Theorem Proving Group</A> 
       
    89 chaired by <A HREF="http://www4.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~nipkow/">Prof. Tobias Nipkow</A> and
       
    90 is accommodated by the institute of 
       
    91 <A HREF="http://www4.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~broy/">Prof. Manfred Broy</A>.
       
    92 <P>
       
    93 
       
    94 <B>Past Positions</B> 
       
    95 Between September 2008 and February 2009, I was an invited research fellow in 
       
    96 the <A HREF="http://www.cs.princeton.edu/">Department of Computer Science</A> in Princeton.
       
    97 In 2004/05 I was an Alexander-von-Humboldt fellow in Munich and 
       
    98 from 2000 until 2004 I was awarded a Research Fellowship in Cambridge. Before that
       
    99 I did my PhD in Cambridge.
       
   100 <P>
       
   101 
       
   102 <B>Research Interests</B> theorem provers, programming languages, compilers, 
       
   103 algorithms, proof theory, type systems, concurrency, lambda calculus, unification, 
       
   104 regular expressions, computability, complexity, functional and logic  programming.
       
   105 <P>
       
   106 
       
   107 <B>Conferences</B>
       
   108 <A HREF="http://www.iiia.csic.es/~levy/unif06/">UNIF'06</A> (member of PC), 
       
   109 <A HREF="http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~bpientka/lfmtp07">LFMTP'07</A> (member of PC), 
       
   110 <A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/activities/lfmtp08/">LFMTP'08</A> (PC co-chair), 
       
   111 <A HREF="http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sweirich/wmm/">WMM'08</A> (member of PC),
       
   112 <A HREF="http://www.mat.ufmg.br/lsfa2008/">LSFA'08</A> (invited speaker),
       
   113 <A HREF="http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/maribel/TAASN.html">TAASN'09</A> (member of PC),
       
   114 <A HREF="http://lsfa09.cic.unb.br/">LSFA'09</A> (member of PC),
       
   115 <A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/activities/tphols09/idw.html">IDW'09</A> (organiser),
       
   116 <A HREF="http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~sweirich/wmm/wmm09.html">WMM'09</A> (PC chair),
       
   117 <A HREF="http://tphols.in.tum.de/">TPHOLs'09</A> (PC co-chair),
       
   118 <A HREF="http://dream.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/automatheo-2010/">Automatheo'10</A> (member of PC),
       
   119 <A HREF="http://www.floc-conference.org/">ITP'10</A> (member of PC),
       
   120 <A HREF="http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/maribel/UNIF.html">UNIF'10</A> (invited speaker),
       
   121 <A HREF="http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/wmm/">WMM'10</A> (invited speaker),
       
   122 <A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/activities/idw10/idw.html">IDW'10</A> (co-organiser),
       
   123 <A HREF="http://formes.asia/cpp">CPP'11</A> (member of PC),
       
   124 <A HREF="http://www.rdp2011.uns.ac.rs/rta/">RTA'11</A> (member of PC),
       
   125 <A HREF="http://lfmtp11.cs.umn.edu">LFMTP'11</A> (member of PC)
       
   126 <BR>
       
   127 
       
   128 </TD>
       
   129 </TR>
       
   130 
       
   131 <TR>
       
   132 <TD BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" WIDTH="75%">
       
   133 <B>Nominal Isabelle</B> 
       
   134 I currently work on Nominal 
       
   135 <A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de">Isabelle</A>. This is joint work with 
       
   136 <A HREF="http://wwwbroy.in.tum.de/~berghofe/">Dr Stefan Berghofer</A>,
       
   137 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~wenzelm/">Dr Markus Wenzel</A>,
       
   138 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~kaliszyk/">Dr Cezary Kaliszyk</A> and 
       
   139 the Isabelle-team in Munich.
       
   140 Many of the theoretical ideas originate from the nominal logic project - a wonderful project headed 
       
   141 by <A HREF="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~amp12/">Prof. Andrew Pitts</A>.  
       
   142 The aim of my work is to make formal reasoning involving binders as simple as 
       
   143 on paper and the hope is to lure  
       
   144 <A HREF="http://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/cgi-bin/poplmark/index.php?title=The_POPLmark_Challenge#Vision">masses</A> to automated
       
   145 theorem proving. My funding for this work was provided in 2004 and 2005 by a research 
       
   146 fellowship from the 
       
   147 <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_von_Humboldt">Alexander-von-Humboldt</A>
       
   148 <A HREF="http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/home.html">foundation</A>. During this time I was a visitor in the group of 
       
   149 <A HREF="http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~schwicht/">Prof. Helmut Schwichtenberg</A>.
       
   150 Since 2006 this work is supported by an
       
   151 <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether">Emmy-Noether</A> 
       
   152 <A HREF="http://www.dfg.de/en/research_funding/programmes/individual/emmy_noether/in_brief/index.html">fellowship</A>.
       
   153 There is a <A HREF="http://isabelle.in.tum.de/nominal/">webpage</A> and a
       
   154 <A HREF="https://mailmanbroy.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/mailman/listinfo/nominal-isabelle">mailing list</A> 
       
   155 about Nominal Isabelle. It also includes a list of projects that use Nominal Isabelle.
       
   156 Users of Nominal Isabelle had their papers appearing at LICS, POPL, FOSSACS, SOS, TPHOLs and CPP.
       
   157 </TD>
       
   158 </TR>
       
   159 
       
   160 <TR>
       
   161 <TD BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" WIDTH="75%">
       
   162 <B>Myhill-Nerode and Regular Expressions</B> 
       
   163 Out of frustration of having to teach inductions in theorem provers using worn-out examples like
       
   164 fib and even/odd, we implemented a large part of regular language theory in Isabelle/HOL.
       
   165 This <A HREF="http://afp.sourceforge.net/devel-entries/Myhill-Nerode.shtml">implementation</A> 
       
   166 gives rise to much more interesting examples, as shown 
       
   167 <A HREF="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/papers/regexp/jfp.ps">here</A> and 
       
   168 <A HREF="http://ropas.snu.ac.kr/~kwang/paper/06-jfp-yi.pdf">here</A>. It turns out that
       
   169 formalisations of automata theory are a huge 
       
   170 <A HREF="https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/cl-isabelle-users/2005-September/msg00012.html">pain</A> 
       
   171 in theorem provers, especially in those that are HOL-based. 
       
   172 We therefore went against the 
       
   173 <A HREF="http://books.google.com/books?id=8lKyxS8_CNoC&amp;pg=PA14&amp;source=gbs_toc_r&amp;cad=4#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">mainstream</A> 
       
   174 and used in our formalisation regular expressions exclusively,
       
   175 because they are much more convenient for formal reasoning. The results we
       
   176 formalised include: the Myhill-Nerode theorem, the closure of regular languages
       
   177 under complementation, finiteness of derivatives of regular expressions and a surprising 
       
   178 result about Subseq, which according to 
       
   179 this 
       
   180 <A HREF="http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2006/01/theorem-that-should-be-better-known.html">blog</A> 
       
   181 should be better known. This is joint work with Prof. Xingyuan
       
   182 Zhang and his student Chunhan Wu from the 
       
   183 <A HREF="http://www.ust.com.cn/">PLA University of Science and Technology</A> in Nanjing. 
       
   184 My funding for this work came from the 
       
   185 <A HREF="http://www.sinogermanscience.org.cn/">Chinese-German Research Centre</A>. 
       
   186 </TD>
       
   187 </TR>
       
   188 
       
   189 <TR>
       
   190 <TD BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" WIDTH="75%">
       
   191 <B>Nominal Unification and Alpha-Prolog</B> 
       
   192 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/Unification">Nominal unification</A> is one outcome of 
       
   193 my involvement in the nominal logic project in Cambridge. Another is the logic programming language 
       
   194 alpha-Prolog (joint work with <A HREF="http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jcheney/">Dr James Cheney</A>), 
       
   195 which uses nominal unification - click for details 
       
   196 <A HREF="http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jcheney/programs/aprolog/">here</A>.
       
   197 The nominal unification algorithm has been 
       
   198 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/Unification">formally verified</A> in Isabelle. This 
       
   199 was possible  since this unification algorithm is formulated in a simple first-order language 
       
   200 (unlike other algorithms for higher-order unification). 
       
   201 <A HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dfried/">Prof. Daniel Friedman</A> and his group use nominal 
       
   202 unification in their alpha-Kanren system implemented in Scheme. 
       
   203 <A HREF="http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/maribel/">Prof. Maribel Fernandez</A> and her student
       
   204 improved the nominal unification algorithm to be quadratic. 
       
   205 My funding for this work was provided through a research fellowship from 
       
   206 <A HREF="http://www.corpus.cam.ac.uk">Corpus Christi College</A>, Cambridge. 
       
   207 </TD>
       
   208 </TR>
       
   209 
       
   210 <TR>
       
   211 <TD BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"  WIDTH="75%">
       
   212 <B>Classical Logic</B>
       
   213 I was Ph.D. student in the University of Cambridge 
       
   214 <A HREF="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk">Computer Laboratory</A>
       
   215 and for three years 
       
   216 called Gonville and Caius College my home. I was very lucky to have   
       
   217 <A HREF="http://research.microsoft.com/~gmb/">Dr Gavin Bierman</A>
       
   218 as supervisor. My research in Cambridge was also very  much influenced by 
       
   219 <A HREF="http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~martin/">Prof. Martin Hyland</A>.
       
   220 Some details on my thesis "Classical Logic and Computation" are 
       
   221 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/PhD/index.html">elsewhere</A>, including
       
   222 a <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/Cut/cutapplet.html">Java Applet</A> that 
       
   223 'visualises' some of the results from the thesis. I completed the writing of
       
   224 the thesis in  <A HREF="http://iml.univ-mrs.fr/ldp/">Marseille</A> in the group of 
       
   225 <A HREF="http://iml.univ-mrs.fr/~girard/">Prof. Jean-Yves Girard</A>. My study in 
       
   226 Cambridge was funded by two <A HREF="http://www.daad.de/index.html">scholarships</a> 
       
   227 from the German government; my year in Marseille by a TMR-fellowship from the EU. 
       
   228 My PhD was also one starting point for the EPSRC Project on the Semantics of Classical 
       
   229 Proofs. The strong normalisation result in the PhD has recently been used by 
       
   230 <A HREF="http://www.loria.fr/~ckirchne/hot.html">Prof. Claude Kirchner</A> and his 
       
   231 students to prove consistency for their superdeduction system lemuridae.
       
   232 </TD>
       
   233 </TR>
       
   234 
       
   235 
       
   236 
       
   237 <TR>
       
   238 <TD BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" WIDTH="75%">
       
   239 <B>Forum</B> 
       
   240 I implemented Forum, a programming language based on classical linear logic, 
       
   241 as my M.Phil. thesis. This was joint work with 
       
   242 <A HREF="http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~rd/">Dr Roy Dyckhoff</A>. 
       
   243 Details can be found  
       
   244 <A HREF="http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~rd/logic/nonmac/">here</A> and
       
   245 <A HREF="http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/Labo/Dale.Miller/forum/">here</A>. During my
       
   246 M.Phil study I spent one month in Philadelphia invited by 
       
   247 <A HREF="http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~dale/">Prof. Dale Miller</A>.
       
   248 </TD>
       
   249 </TR>
       
   250 
       
   251 <TR>
       
   252 <TD BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" WIDTH="75%">
       
   253 <B>G4ip</B> An implementation of G4ip using the imperative language Pizza can be found 
       
   254 <A HREF="http://www4.in.tum.de/~urbanc/Prover/index.html">here</A>.
       
   255 <A HREF="http://pizzacompiler.sourceforge.net">Pizza</A> is a conservative 
       
   256 extension of Java and a precursor of Scala. The implementation illustrates the technique of success 
       
   257 continuations.
       
   258 </TD>
       
   259 </TR>
       
   260  
       
   261 
       
   262 </TABLE>
       
   263 <P><!-- Created: Tue Mar  4 00:23:25 GMT 1997 -->
       
   264 <!-- hhmts start -->
       
   265 Last modified: Mon Sep  5 10:11:36 BST 2011
       
   266 <!-- hhmts end -->
       
   267 <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer">[Validate this page.]</a>
       
   268 
       
   269 <!-- script type="text/javascript">
       
   270 var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
       
   271 document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
       
   272 </script>
       
   273 <script type="text/javascript">
       
   274 try {
       
   275 var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-4143458-2");
       
   276 pageTracker._trackPageview();
       
   277 } catch(err) {}
       
   278 </script -->
       
   279 </BODY>
       
   280 </HTML>