[Colloquium] Samuels/Dissertation Defense/Jul 12, 2016

[Margaret Jaffey]

       Department of Computer Science/The University of Chicago

                     *** Dissertation Defense ***


Candidate:  Lamont Samuels

Date:  Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Time:  11:00 AM

Place:  Ryerson 276

Title: Declarative Computer Graphics using Functional Reactive
Programming

Abstract:
Most graphics applications are highly interactive and event-driven.
These applications must con- tinuously interact and respond to events
firing from the outside environment, such as mouse and keyboard
events, while also updating their internal state in response to these
events. As an appli- cation grows in complexity, the process of
handling these external events and maintaining a valid application
state becomes more challenging.

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is another approach to
programming interactive appli- cations. FRP languages define
abstractions, called signals, to express time-varying values. Signals
can either be continuous (always changing) or discrete (changing at
specific points in time). These abstractions allow for modeling
external events or internal changes in a more direct and declarative
way by making their behavior more explicit. The FRP system
automatically manages dependen- cies between signals, which allows
programmers to express their logic at a higher-level instead of
dealing with the low-level implementation details of mutable state and
callbacks that are required in the event-driven paradigm.

In this dissertation, we continue to advance the abstractions provided
by prior FRP languages by presenting a new language called Tesel,
which provides a new abstraction (i.e., signal groups) for distinctly
propagating discrete and continuous signal changes efficiently through
the program. This dissertation presents a detailed description of the
language and its implementation, a formal operational semantics and
the implementations for the Tesel compiler and runtime system. We also
show how Tesel can be used to write practical and efficient graphics
applications.

Lamont's advisor is Prof. John Reppy

Login to the Computer Science Department website for details,
including a draft copy of the dissertation:

 https://www.cs.uchicago.edu/phd/phd_announcements#lamonts

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Margaret P. Jaffey            margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 156)               (773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago      http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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