Like many others, my website is under a constant barrage of crawling from bots. I need to figure out which one is hosing me, but I am also resisting having third-party trackers of any form. I took a look at hosting a Plausible instance as OCaml does, but it's yet another service to run and maintain.
The sister conference to PROPL was held late last year in Scotland with a bumper attendance from Cambridge. All of the talks from it are now available online at YouTube, or on our ad-free EEG video site.
It's about the time of the academic year to come up with project ideas! KC Sivaramakrishnan, Andy Ray and I have been looking into FPGA/OCaml matters recently so I thought I'd review the latest in the land of Webassembly for non-traditional hardware targets.
The European Space Agency organised the first conference on Biodiversity Insights from Space (BioSpace) in February this year, and it seems like it was a huge success. The conference itself sold out within days, and the program was so packed that the organisers had to split it into multiple chunks during the week to cope with everyone.
I was gobsmacked to get a note from the SIGARCH ASPLOS steering committee that our 2013 paper "Unikernels: library operating systems for the cloud" won the most influential paper award at the conference last week! I couldn't make it to Rotterdam myself due to the travel time, but Richard Mortier was already there and so accepted the award on the whole team's behalf!
Over in my EEG group, we have a lot of primary and secondary datasets lying around: 100s of terabytes of satellite imagery, biodiversity data, academic literature, and the intermediate computations that go along with them. Our trusty central shared storage server running TrueNAS stores data in ZFS and serves it over NFSv4 to a bunch of hosts.
Dominic Orchard and I had a blast running the first PROPL workshop a couple of years ago, with a full room and engaged audience in POPL in London. Last year, our sister conference LOCO took over, and it's our turn again this year! PROPL will return for a second outing in October, co-located with ICFP/SPLASH in Singapore in October.
An access library for the world crop, food production and consumption datasets This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Alison Eyres and Thomas Ball. Agricultural habitat degradation is a leading threat to global biodiversity.
Runtimes à la carte: crossloading native and bytecode OCaml This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Jeremy Chen. It is co-supervised with David Allsopp.
3D printing the planet (or bits of it) This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Finley Stirk. It is co-supervised with Michael Dales. Thanks to a combination of satellite information, remote sensors and data-science, we now are able to reason about places all over the globe from the comfort of our desks and offices.
Autoscaling geospatial computation with Python and Yirgacheffe This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Michael Dales. Python is a popular tool for geospatial data-science, but it, along with the GDAL library, handle resource management poorly. Python does not deal with parallelism well and GDAL can be a memory hog when parallelised.