This award provides travel and subsistence to graduates students (and some undergraduates) who will attend the Oregon Programming Languages Summer School (OPLSS) on "Types, Semantics and Verification." The program is available at www.cs.uoregon.edu/Activities/summerschool/summer11/. The summer school is a two-week event that brings together top international researchers and students to engage in lectures and discussions on leading-edge foundational topics in programming languages and software verification, much of which is not yet in textbooks. The NSF support ensures participation of US students while paying attention to underrepresented groups. The summer school will help build the next generation of researchers and a global workforce with expertise in these important areas of research and education. 100 students have registered for the 2011 summer school. The organizers will make video of lectures and other educational materials available to the public immediately after the event.
The Oregon Progamming Languages Summer School has been the premier summer school for graduate students involved in programming Language research and new graduate students exploring the feasibility of starting programming language research. The summer school is presented as four 90-minute lectures per day for two weeks. The first few days cover logical foundations of programming languages and are approachable by students with a standard undergraduate degree in Computer Science. The program builds on this introduction to discuss leading edge results in the final lectures. In addition to the formal program, the summer school seeks to build a world-wide community of students and researchers who will collaborate in the future. To this end, the summer school also provides a venue for the students to share their research interests and their results in a series of short talks. Attendance at the summer shool has approached one humdred students the last few years. Half of the students attending this year's summer school were from US universities. The remaining half represented 18 countries on four continents. The majority of the attendees were graduate students, with six attendess from software companies, three undergraduates, four professors and seven post-doctorate researchers. The theme of the summer school centers around understanding the deep connections between mathematical structures, type theory and logic. The goal is to create a foundation for program development and for reasoning about programs. This is of foremost importance due to the fact that computers are present in many aspects of our daily life, from driving a car to performing an online banking or commercial transaction. The need to establish the security and correctness of application programs has never been greater. The summer school considers recent advances in programming languages that aim to address this need.
