AngloHaskell/2008

This page serves as a historical record of the glorious debauchery that took place at AngloHaskell 2008. You have now missed AngloHaskell 2008.

Slides and audio from the talks and fungrit are now available thanks to matthew-_

Anglo Haskell has previously happened at Microsoft Research, Cambridge in both 2006 and 2007 much fun was had! For 2008, we think it should happen again, but this time at Imperial College, London. Who's up for it (add names further down)?

This year it's being (un)organised by Matthew Sackman (matthew-_), Tristan Allwood (ToRA) and Ganesh Sittampalam (Heffalump) who all regularly sit on #haskell and #anglohaskell (with nicks in (parenthesis)). Philippa Cowderoy is also prodding the organisers at regular intervals to do some organising...

Audio cast

There will be an audio cast available from 11am BST (GMT/UTC +1) on the Friday, and 1pm BST on the Saturday from:

http://streams.wellquite.org:8000/AngloHaskell2008.ogg

Date and Venue

We have a suitable sized room booked out at: the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, Huxley Building Room 344, 180 Queen's Gate, London SW7 2AZ, UK, on Friday the 8th and Saturday the 9th of August.

The room that we have booked is quite nicely reconfigurable, so we can do break away groups and such or even multiple tracks if there is demand for this.

Some reasonable instructions for getting to Imperial are available.

Details for getting to the Department of Computing and the event room (Huxley 344) are now available. There will likely be some lambdas dotted around Huxley & the walkway to point you in the right direction on the day.

Contact Details

• Matthew Sackman: 07970 045 734
• Tristan Allwood: 07903 828 660
• Ganesh Sittampalam: [removed long after the event to reduce googlability]

For Friday, Matthew is the preferred person to ring if you get lost or locked out, for Saturday, ring Tristan.

WiFi

WiFi will be available at Imperial throughout the weekend. There is a simple mac-registration system which you can do through your laptops and all should work without a hitch.

Lodging

It's likely that there'll be people in need of crashspace and so forth. If you need to, please you this area and #anglohaskell to organise where to stay overnight.

Imperial does offer lodging in its halls but they're very expensive. There are some useful contacts if you want to phone and barter. Or, possibly just crashing with friends on floors with sleeping bags and so forth might be simpler and certainly cheaper. Also don't forget that Imperial is about 10 mins walk from South Kensington tube station so public transportation is available if you want to rush home.

Note that parking is both expensive and highly competitive in the surrounding area so it would probably be easier to not drive in. Parking for bicycles is available on campus, provided you have your own bike locks.

Wigram House, one of the Westminster Uni halls, offers its rooms cheap. It's round the corner from Victoria Station, which is two stops along from South Kensington. Rooms can be booked through TravelStay for £28/night + £3 booking fee, or from one of the other broker sites.

Attendees

We have a roll of labels and a pen. Attendees will not be allowing in the room without a label with their name and IRC handle on it being stuck to them!

Attendees should consider signing up for dinner on Friday too.

Definite

Please add yourself to a list here if you know you can attend.

• Simon Marlow
• Matthew Sackman
• Tristan Allwood
• Ganesh Sittampalam
• Pieter Laeremans
• Philippa Cowderoy
• Tom Harper
• Neil Mitchell
• Neil Brown
• Edwin Brady (Friday only)
• Simon PJ (Friday only)
• Alistair Bayley (probably Friday only)
• Eric Kow
• Ian Lynagh
• Matt Amos
• Alex McGuire (probably Friday only)
• Richard Barrell
• Ashley Moran
• Jim Whitehead
• Derek Wright
• Matt Russell
• Fermin Reig
• Susan Eisenbach (Friday only)
• Max Bolingbroke (Saturday only)
• John Dias

Possible

• Lauri Pesonen
• Roly Perera
• Alex McLean
• Chaddaï Fouché
• Jamie Brandon
• Duncan Coutts
• James Rowe
• David Himmelstrup
• Simon Parry
• Chris Done

Please add yourself to a list here if you think you can attend.

Programme

Planning will be taking place on IRC as per last year: #anglohaskell on irc.freenode.net

If you're having trouble following things on IRC, the discussion page on the wiki might be a good place to leave comments and questions.

There are going to be five talks on Friday followed by an evening meal followed by pubbage. On Saturday there will be a lengthy brunch followed by four talks and then potentially some hacking.

Friday night dinner

For dinner on Friday, there are many good pubs around Imperial and some really decent pubs across London many of which sell decent PubGastro food. If you want to rush off to meet friends, family etc then that's obviously fine, but if you'd like to stay around for a geeky evening meal then that might be fun.

We're proposing to go up to Giraffe at High Street Kensington which is about a 10-15 minute walk from Imperial. It has a menu which should give some idea - basically if you just have a main and a drink then you can get by for less than £15 which is pretty damn good for that part of London. I (Matthew) have been to this particular Giraffe at least a dozen times over the last 5 years and I do think it's probably the best value for money in the surrounding area.

Dinner is now booked for the following people at 7pm. If you wish to join us, please contact us asap on #anglohaskell. Also, it would be ideal if people could bring cash, so we don't have to irritate them by producing 20 credit cards! You will have to preorder your meal on the Friday morning. Menus will be provided.

• Matthew Sackman
• Tristan Allwood
• Philippa Cowderoy
• Tom Harper
• Ganesh Sittampalam
• Edwin Brady
• Neil Mitchell + 1
• Neil Brown
• Richard Barrell
• Eric Kow
• Ashley Moran
• Ian Lynagh
• Duncan Coutts
• Simon Marlow
• Jim Whitehead
• Derek Wright
• Alistair Bayley

Saturday

We have the room at Imperial booked here as well and are planning on using it for talks. Later on, if people want a quiet place to Group Hack with access to whiteboards and so forth then it could be used for that. Let's see how many people want to give talks, but other suggestions for Saturday could be noted here too.

Other Thoughts

For potential group hacking on Saturday, we need something to hack on. On what shall we hack?

I have a suggestion, although it's not quite hacking. Could we sit down together and run darcs through the profiler? The outcome I desire from this is (a) a Haskell wiki page showing you how to profile a largeish program and make sense of the output [and act on it] and (b) more insight into darcs performance and (c) more Haskellers working on darcs -- kowey 16:20, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Talks

It wouldn't be AngloHaskell without some talks, so volunteers please! Previously we have had a largely more practical set of talks than you might find at Fun in the Afternoon or an academic event. This was a good thing, and some of the best talks were from people who were far from considering themselves as experts, so feel free to tell us about your experiences.

The room booked at Imperial has multiple projectors and connections for laptops and so forth. It even has whiteboards.

• Simon Marlow has promised to keynote on Parallel GC
• Matthew Sackman could talk on automatic type level static analysis of embedded Domain Specific Languages.
• Tristan Allwood - Making zippers for structured editors
• Philippa Cowderoy - Fusion-powered EDSLs
• Neil Mitchell - Hoogle 4, fast type searching (I gave an AngloHaskell 2007 talk, so would be happy to defer to someone else)
• Ganesh Sittampalam - Squiggle: using associated types to embed SQL
• Tom Harper - Stream fusion on Haskell Unicode strings
• Neil Brown - Explicit concurrency with the CHP library
• Max Bolingbroke - GHC Plugins

• Dan Popa volunteered a talk on modular interpreters, but was unable to attend. His slides are available from here

Timetable

A programme, talks need to be confirmed and can change around. I've assumed a rough 35mins + 10min questions/overrun/discussion per talk - shout if this is a problem.

Friday

Time	Event
10am	Matthew and Tristan around to open up
10:30 am	Tea, coffee, water and biscuits
11am	Welcome, Start!
11:15am	Keynote (Simon Marlow)
12pm	Talk 2 (Tom Harper)
12:45pm	Lunch - see below
2pm	Talk 3 (Tristan Allwood)
2:45pm	Talk 4 (Philippa Cowderoy)
3:30pm	Tea, coffee, water and biscuits
4pm	Talk 5 (Neil Brown)
4:45pm	Functional grit - small talks that may grow into functional pearls. Open session, see below.
7pm at resturant	Food! - see above
Beer o'Clock	When everyone's finished eating, we'll head for a nearby pub

Friday Lunch

We will be able to provide some food (as-well as tea/coffee/water) for the Friday Lunch spot. Provisionally it will be:

• Sandwiches
  • Mozerella & Sundried Tomato
  • Egg Mayo
  • Tuna & Pepper
  • Chicken & Sweetcorn
• Vegetable wraps
• Tuna Coquettes
• Veg Quiche
• Random fruit
• Cake

Functional Grit

This is an informal and quick forum to discuss ideas and work - anyone can give a quick (30 seconds to 10 minutes) talk! Feel free to turn up with 2 slides (pdf, usb stick!) and give a quick talk on what you're up to or thinking about. We will organise this further on the day - no need to pre register for this.

Saturday

Time	Event
10am onwards, as people stagger out of bed	Brunch at Marble Arch Wetherspoons (see below)
12.15pm	Mosey across Hyde Park back to Imperial
1pm	Talk 1 (Matthew Sackman)
1:45pm	Talk 2 (Neil Mitchell)
2:30pm	Break
3pm	Talk 3 (Ganesh Sittampalam)
3:45pm	Talk 4 (Max Bolingbroke)
4:30pm onwards	Hacking? Pubbage? Dinner?
Tired o'Clock	Depart!

Brunch

We're hoping to do this at the Marble Arch Wetherspoons which is a 30 min walk away from Imperial (though across Hyde Park, so should be a nice walk!). They open at 8am and have a selection of food. We apologise for resorting to a Wetherspoon's, but they really are the only suitable place which will be open early enough and will be serving breakfast.