Luca Saiu

[Luca Saiu]

I'm a temporary teaching and research associate working in the LCR group, LIPN, Université Paris Nord.

My thesis will be an idiosynchratic blend of programming languages (logic and functional), linear logic and game theory. My two advisors are Christophe Fouqueré and Jean-Vincent Loddo.

Contact information

This page explains how to contact me.

Only if you are behind LIPN's firewall (sorry for that), you can even directly connect to the workstation I phisically work on, in my office.

Interests

I'm interested in programming languages, including their semantics and efficient implementation. Most of my recent experience revolves around functional languages, compilers and runtime systems (particularly garbage collection). I've also developed a deep interest in algorithms, parallel computation, concurrency and, to a lesser extent, computer networks and virtualization.

I'm a very strong programmer in C, C++, Scheme and ML. I also claim at least some proficiency in a dozen or so other languages, most of which (for example Java) don't deserve any publicity; the ones which do include Forth, Prolog, Haskell and APL.

Teaching

I teach DLL (Development of Free Software: a small course about the history, philosophy and practice of free software; Master 1 Informatique, Institut Galilée, Université Paris Nord), PFA (Advanced Functional Programming: Master 2 PLS, Institut Galilée, Université Paris Nord; I do the class part, and Jean-Yves Moyen prepares and manages lab sessions) and PI (Imperative Programming: Licence 1 Informatique, Institut Galilée, Université Paris Nord; I only do exercise and lab sessions for group 6; the course is managed by Sébastien Guérif.

After the end of my first course in 2007 a group of students asked me more pointers about how to use GNU/Linux from the command line. Here are my suggestions.

(Some) peer-reviewed publications

Drafts and Technical Reports

Talks

Here is a list of some talks of mine.

Politics

I'm an official GNU maintainer, and I deeply believe in free software. By the way, I've studied in depth the GNU General Public License version 3, released in June 2007. I like it very much, and I've upgraded all my maintained software which was currently covered by "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv3 or later".

[Free Software: GPL version 3]
I urge you to do the same, and use "GPLv3 or later" for your new projects.

I'm an associate member of the Free Software Foundation and a fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

[FSF Associate Member] [FSFE Fellow]

Here is the experimental video rotation from the FSF - apparently when there is no recent video, they replace it with a widget for subscribing to the newsletter, so you might see the subscription form below:

I'm a Wikipedian:

Wikipedia Affiliate Button

We should boycott companies joining MPEG LA's patent pool. Plase sign this pledge.

[boycott warning to companies considering joining MPEG LA's patent pool]

I also boycott Sony, and urge everybody to do the same. See this page for more information, and the e-mail I wrote them.

Projects

GNU epsilon

(2001-)
My most ambitious project. Its homepage should be updated, but epsilon is very much alive.
I'm now starting its fourth re-implementation from scratch.

epsilon's parallel garbage collector is very interesting and has evolved into an independent project.

NAUSEA

(2005-)
with Dario Russo.
Extremely cool.
LOGOS, again written with Dario Russo, is just one of its possible applications.
See the NAUSEA project page on Savannah.

Marionnet

(2007-)
with Jean-Vincent Loddo.
This also includes a simple but very nice kernel hack.

Now Marionnet has its own home page.

glyphification-mode

A minor mode for Emacs. Not polished and not released yet, but here's a video demonstration of a not-so-recent version.
It works with GNU Emacs 22 and later (a hook I use has been renamed since Emacs 21).
The new lexicon for epsilon is going to make use of this, but --as any minor mode-- the glyphification-mode is conceived to be useful in many different contexts and for most languages.

ICFP programming contests

(2004, 2005, 2006)
alone in 2004 and 2005, with Marco Righi in 2006.

Older projects, stuff which is currently unmaintained or not maintained by me

"Youth" projects

From the long gone years when I considered C++ my favorite language.

Miscellaneous hacks of mine

Most of this could be classified as recreational Computer Science -- which doesn't imply that it can't be interesting, or even contain pretty advanced stuff.
Most of these hacks were implemented in one or two days, and their packaging and presentation is far from optimal.

Partial evaluation

An online partial evaluator with support for partially-static data for a simple flowchart language with S-expressions as data structures.
It optimizes in a quite aggressive way, and does not always exactly preserve semantics: computations may be discarded (specializing some non-terminating subject progams yields terminating residual programs), even if they are never duplicated.

An optimizing brainf*ck compiler

Neural networks

The classic feed-forward network with backpropagation, more or less the same as the one written by every Computer Science student in the world.
You also wrote one, didn't you?

APL keyboard

My hand-made APL keyboard is my only published "hardware hack" so far.

Project Euler

I like to solve Project Eurler problems using Guile (a Scheme implementation and the GNU extension language), in the mean time before epsilon becomes mature enough for this. It shouldn't take long now.

What I'm interested in here is language expressivity, and my solutions usually don't employ advanced mathematics; rather, I want to factorize my code as far as possible into reusable abstractions. I've written much of my personal Scheme macro library starting from some of these problems.

So far I've used Guile for all of my submissions.

Personal

To do: write something here. Or, even better, don't.

To do: refactor. Look at this, this, and also at this.

My public GPG key

You can find my GNU Privacy Guard public key here.

Please come back in a few days...
I'm going to fill (most of) the stubs real soon now. Yeah, trust me.

This is the master copy of my home page located at http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~saiu.

[Hacker emblem]
Luca Saiu
Last modified: 2012-01-26

Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 Luca Saiu
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved.