A digest of posts from FPL members and collaborators.

FPL Members

KC Sivaramakrishnan

Shrinking the OxCaml js_of_ocaml bundle: 285 MB to 4 MB

In the previous post on capsules, I cheated. The lecture I was adapting (from my CS6868 course on language abstractions for parallelism) used Await_capsule.Mutex.with_lock, the recommended non-deprecated way to acquire a capsule mutex, but the post shipped…

Capsules: compile-time lock discipline in OxCaml

In the previous post we fixed the racy gensym with Portable.Atomic. That worked because the shared state was a single integer with atomic primitives. What about state that needs a hash table, a multi-step update, or any structure where atomics aren’t enough? OxCaml’s answer is…

Data race freedom in OxCaml

A while back I wired up x-ocaml so this blog could embed live, editable OCaml notebooks. That post used a vanilla OCaml 5 toplevel. Today the toplevel running in your browser is built from OxCaml, the Jane Street fork of the compiler. That means we can prove a small parallel…

Durwasa Chakraborty

Prof CPR and the Resuscitation of Algorithmic Thinking

“You start problem-solving with mathematical thinking. To obtain a solution, you extend it to computational thinking. But to actually implement it on the computer, you need algorithmic thinking” Prof. CPR

Soundness and Sambar at IISc Bangalore

A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Bangalore for a hackathon at the Indian Institute of Science, organised by Prof. Siddharth Gadgilhttps://math.iisc.ac.in/~gadgil/ and Emergence AI. The structure of the hackathon was: spend the first couple of days getting taught…

Friends

Anil Madhavapeddy

Voluntary AI disclosure proposal for OCaml: update 1

A quick update on my proposal for voluntary AI disclosure in OCaml code. The online discussion thread has gathered a lot of thoughtful feedback, both public and private, so I posted a digest of where I think things stand and what we might do next. It’s reproduced here for the…

.plan-26-19: Ancient oaks, parliamentary evidence, and TESSERA in the City

This was a week of going to nice offsites, giving talks and catching up on the massive backlog of reviews and admin that had been piling up through the travel and paper writing of the past few weeks. At least my inbox is vaguely approaching three digits unread…

.plan-26-18: From tropical forest protection to oi swallowing its oxcaml tail

REDD+ over-crediting in Nature Communications Our paper on learning lessons from over-crediting in REDD+ projects came out this week in Nature Communications, led by Thomas Swinfield. The reception to the paper has generally been encouragingly positive, especially with the…