I am Ifaz and I am currently finishing up my Masters at the University of Waterloo, Canada. In the coming Fall, I will be starting my PhD at the University of Alberta, Canada. Like everyone else writing the pre-conference blog post for ECOOP and ISSTA I am obligated to express an interest in programming languages! More seriously, I am interested in type systems for programming languages.

I currently work on Object-Oriented languages. Particularly, I work with the DOT calculus, a formalization of the Scala programming language. Much of my current work involves extending DOT with features from Scala and proving them safe. Other than the DOT calculus, I’m also interested in type systems that ensure null-reference safety in Object-Oriented languages. Moving away from Object-Oriented programming, I like functional programming, Hindley-Milner style type inference systems, and using type systems to ensure safe interaction with external services such as databases.

In terms of things I hope to gain from the conference, I firstly hope to meet fellow researchers in Programming Languages from across the Atlantic and learn about research life in Europe and how it differs from research life in North America. Since I come from a Scala formalization background, there are several presentations at the FTfJP Workshop that I hope to attend. I hope that a first hand view at current trends in formalization will benefit my current and future work in formalization. Since I am planning to pivot towards static analysis for my PhD, and I will also be attending some presentation in the ISSTA main track to see what people are working on in this space.

I will also be attending the Summer School and will be a student volunteer. For the summer school, I am hoping to learn more about static analysis and the history of functional programming.