CPS Seminar: Wednesday 16 September 2026, 14:00 - 15:00

Building 58, room 1067

Speaker: Philip Wadler, UK, one of the pioneers of Programming Language research, who contributed a few pivotal ideas in Computer Science and in the design of languages such as Haskell, Java, and Xquery.

Title: Proof: artificial intelligence and real assistants 

Abstract: Proof assistants, including Lean, Rocq, and Agda, are making inroads in both computing and mathematics. This talk will explain why. It will also consider recent developments in---what else?---AI, and how it relates to proof assistants.

The view of AI will be neither all rosy (I will introduce bullshit as a technical term) nor all gloom. I've coauthored an online textbook on the Agda proof assistant, available at plfa.inf.ed.ac.uk, and I've spoken on AI at the Edinburgh Fringe. 

Bio: Philip Wadler was Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, now retired, and is a Principle Research Fellow at Input Output. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an ACM Fellow. 

He is head of the steering committee for Proceedings of the ACM, past editor-in-chief of PACMPL and JFP, past chair of ACM SIGPLAN, past holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship, winner of the SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award, and a winner of the POPL Most Influential Paper Award.

Previously, he worked or studied at Stanford, Xerox Parc, CMU, Oxford, Chalmers, Glasgow, Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, and visited as a guest professor in Copenhagen, Sydney, and Paris.

He has an h-index of over 75 with more than 25,000 citations to his work, according to Google Scholar. He contributed to the designs of Haskell, Java, and XQuery, and is co-author of Introduction to Functional Programming (Prentice Hall, 1988), XQuery from the Experts (Addison Wesley, 2004), Generics and Collections in Java (O'Reilly, 2006), and Programming Language Foundations in Agda (online, 2018).

He has delivered invited talks in locations ranging from Aizu to Zurich.

Visit Philip Wadler's homepage to find more.