My name is Xuan Bi. I am a 4th-year PhD student at the University of Hong Kong. My research interests center around programming languages, type systems and formal verification. In the past, I have worked on a JVM implementation of System F with support for full tail-call elimination. I have worked on the design of a dependently-typed calculus featuring general recursion and decidable type-checking. I have also worked on the design of a gradual type system with support for implicit higher-rank polymorphism. Think of it as Haskell with gradual typing. My PhD thesis is about designing a type system featuring disjoint intersection types, which has great potential to serve as a foundation for powerful, flexible and yet type-safe and easy to reason OO languages.

At ECOOP this year I will be presenting a paper on the connection between nested composition (a simple form of family polymorphism) and BCD subtyping. The resulting calculus, called NeColus, has a coherent semantics and is able to encode a very elegant solution to the expression problem. I will also be presenting a paper on the design of typed first-class traits. I am really excited to present our work to the ECOOP audience.

I will be a student volunteer, and this is my first time. I am really looking forward to meeting people from all over the world, talking and exchanging ideas with other researchers in this area. I am also very interested to attend Curry on, and hope to talk to people from the industry, as I am graduating soon and decide to apply for industrial research and/or development job.

Finally, I wish this year’s ECOOP will be again a successful event for all the attendees, and a greater opportunity for me to get to know other researchers.