Hans-Wolfgang Loidl

I received an MEng ("Dipl-Ing") degree from Johannes Kepler University in Austria in 1992, and a PhD degree from the University of Glasgow in 1998 for my research on the parallel implementation of functional languages. From 1999 to 2002 I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, on architecture-independent parallelism. From 2002 to 2009 I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Theoretical Computer Science group at Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich on the EU-funded projects MRG and EmBounded. The goal of these projects was to develop an infrastructure for resource-safe computation, dealing with statically inferring resource bounds, (automatically) verifying concrete resource bounds, and certifying resource bounds by employing proof-carrying-code techniques. Since 2009 I am working at the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, first as Assistant Professor, and since 2016 as Associate Professor.

My primary research areas are parallel and functional programming, covering foundations, program analysis, language design and (parallel) implementation, as well as applications especially in embedded systems, FinTech, and health informatics. I am designing and implementing programming languages for easy-to-use parallelism, exploiting multi-cores and clusters of multi-cores, e.g. Glasgow parallel Haskell (GpH), Glasgow distributed Haskell (GdH), and mobile Haskell (mHaskell). GpH is a parallel extension of Haskell that requires only minimal code changes to introduce parallelism. Language design is combined with program analysis and program verification to enhance performance and security, e.g. by providing formal guarantees on resource bounds (e.g. the Camelot language for resource-safe mobile code). More recently I have expanded my research areas to also cover: (1) computer security (Secrious project, EP/T017511/1), specifically using serious games for explaining security challenges; (2) AI, specifically high-performance machine-learning for FinTech (BA grant + industry funded PhD), and (3) health informatics, specifically Brain-computer-interfaces (EPSRC proposal).

For details on my teaching vision see this page.

My main roles at Heriot-Watt University are:

• Senior Programme Director for Computer Science
• Chair of the Undergraduate Board of Studies in Computer Science
• Lead on the quintennial Academic Review for Computer Science 2025

Functional Programming, Parallel Computation,  Program Analysis, Symbolic Computation, High-performance Machine Learning, with applications in Embedded Systems and FinTech.

More information can be found on my personal website.