John Glauert: Research Background
Postgraduate Research
My PhD study was based on the application of coroutines to the
evaluation of relational database queries. A functional language
was implemented as an interface to the system, allowing queries
to be written as recursive functions over the relational algebra.
Studies included transformation of such relational expressions
and optimisation of final query evaluation using indexing and
pipelining techniques.
At Manchester, during my MSc studies and as a Research Associate,
I was part of the Dataflow project which built a highly-successful
practical prototype dataflow system. My MSc project involved the
design and complete implementation of a simple functional language.
An important achievement of this work was the development of a
general scheme for implementing recursive functions on a dataflow
machine. As a Research Associate, I was part of a small international
team which designed Sisal, a high-level functional programming
language for dataflow programming. I was responsible for initial
implementation of the language on the Manchester Dataflow System.
Research at UEA Norwich
Dactl and the Alvey Flagship Project
At the University of East Anglia I have broadened my interest
in declarative languages and architectures. This led to a grant
under the Alvey Programme in collaboration with ICL, Manchester
University, and Imperial College, to develop a sound computational
model and intermediate language for new generation architectures.
This resulted in Dactl, a practical language of generalised graph
rewriting for which there is a stable experimental implementation.
European Declarative System: ESPRIT TIP
Practical aspects of my work on the exploitation of parallelism
continued with the ESPRIT TIP project "European Declarative
System" involving ICL, Bull, Siemens, and ECRC. The recently
announced ICL "Goldrush" product arose from this project.
Semagraph: ESPRIT BRA and WG
Contacts established during the Dactl project with several strong
European groups having similar research interests are now formalised
within the ESPRIT Basic Research Action "SemaGraph",
led by UEA. This includes a very fruitful collaboration with the
Dutch Parallel Reduction Machine Project led by Barendregt at
Nijmegen; the Process Algebra and Term Rewriting group of Klop
at CWI, Amsterdam; Lambda Calculus research at the Laboratoire
d'Informatique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, of Curien;
and the Abstract Interpretation group at Imperial College, led
by Hankin.
Multi-Paradigm Programming through Graph Rewriting
The focus of my current research is the theory and application
of graph-rewriting techniques. With my research student, George
Papadopoulos, there has been a special emphasis on implementation
of parallel logic languages. A current strand of work in collaboration
with the European Computer Industry Research Centre in Munich
is the implementation of functional and process languages through
fine-grain process notations. These may also be implemented via
graph rewriting.
This work was supported byy an ERSRC grant
GR/H41300 Multi-Paradigm Programming through Graph Rewriting.
John Glauert / jrwg@sys.uea.ac.uk