NYFPN Reading Group

As we announced during Anton's talk on financial contracts, we are spinning off a "reading group" which we expect some subset of the NYPFN group will be interested in.

This is intended to be an active rather than passive activity. Each meeting, we will discuss a paper related to functional programming. The expectation is that all attendees will at least have read the paper, if not done some further experimentation. For this reason, we expect to focus on fairly practically-oriented papers. Also, one or more people will have investigated the paper in some depth and should be able to lead the discussion.

We expect to have the reading group jointly decide on the paper to discuss, but this time we have taken the liberty of choosing for you - Strong Types for Relational Databases by Alexandra Silva and Joost Visser. In this paper, the authors present a way of expressing relation algebra in a strongly typed manner in a functional programming language. This is actually quite a tricky problem, because the types of some relational operators are dependent on the names of the columns rather than just the types. Their approach uses Type-Level Programming, and is implemented in Haskell (although the high-level technique is probably not language-specific).

The first meeting will be held at Credit Suisse on Tuesday 29th January, at 6.30pm, at 1 (One) Madison Avenue, between 23rd and 24th St., in the Gramercy Room on the 12th floor. We're not currently sure which entrance is the right one to use, but they should be able to tell you at the main entrance on Madison Ave.

In order to attend, you must register here.

We expect meetings to be roughly every two months.

We hope to see many of you there!
Howard, Jeff and Anton.