Benjamin Crawford Pierce is the Henry Salvatori Professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

. Pierce joined Penn in 1998 from

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universi ...

and held research positions at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

and the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991. His research includes work on

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

s, static type systems,

distributed programming A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

mobile agent In computer science, a mobile agent is a composition of computer software and data that is able to migrate (move) from one computer to another autonomously and continue its execution on the destination computer. In reality, the mobile agent is the c ...

process calculi In computer science, the process calculi (or process algebras) are a diverse family of related approaches for formally modelling concurrent systems. Process calculi provide a tool for the high-level description of interactions, communications, and ...

, and

differential privacy Differential privacy (DP) is a system for publicly sharing information about a dataset by describing the patterns of groups within the dataset while withholding information about individuals in the dataset. The idea behind differential privacy is t ...

. As part of his research, Pierce has led development on several

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

projects, including the Unison

file synchronization File synchronization (or syncing) in computing is the process of ensuring that computer files in two or more locations are updated via certain rules. In ''one-way file synchronization'', also called mirroring, updated files are copied from a sourc ...

utility. In 2012 Pierce became an

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing * ...

for "contributions to the theory and practice of programming languages and their type systems". In 2015 Pierce and co-authors received the award for the most influential Principles of Programming Languages paper, which was described as "instrumental in bringing the view-update problem to the attention of the programming languages community and demonstrating the broad relevance of the problem beyond databases. ..More broadly, the paper sparked a great deal of follow-on work in the area of BX (“ bidirectional transformations”), leading to a fruitful collaboration between the worlds of databases, programming languages, and software engineering."

Books

He is the author of one book on type systems, '' Types and Programming Languages'' . He has also edited a collection of articles to create a second volume ''Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages'' . Based on the notes he collected while learning category theory during his PhD, he also published an introductory book on this topic—''Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists'', . He is one of the authors of the freely available boo
''Software Foundations''

References

External links

Prof. Pierce's Homepage
* * American computer scientists Living people Programming language researchers Year of birth missing (living people) University of Pennsylvania faculty {{compu-bio-stub

Books

See also

References

External links