Oregon Programming Languages Summer School: Sam Smith, Cameron Jones, Alex Hodder-Williams

This past month, we flew to Oregon to attend the 2023 Oregon Programming Languages Summer School.

OPLSS was over two weeks, with the two Sundays free. The lectures were an hour and a half, 4 times a day. The first week lent more heavily into the maths behind languages and proofs over languages with lectures on the Lambda cube, proof theory, logical relations and Category theory. The second week was more about the use of the previous week's content for topics such as program analysis, verified compilation and program synthesis.

There were also 3 participant talk sessions where other participants gave talks on their own research areas. These talks gave a really interesting opportunity to hear about what current MSc and PhD students are working on, and led to some very interesting discussions all round! Thanks to these talks, as well as general chats throughout the fortnight, OPLSS was an amazing opportunity to meet other early stage researchers and industry folk working in related areas. Many of the participants had directly security related research interests, with others working on the underlying theory that much of our security analysis utilises.

Eugene is a beautiful city which is easy to travel around via cycling, with bikes on the street accessible using an app and many bike lanes. There was some great hiking and running around, and we managed to escape the schedule to visit the raptor centre and reach the top of Spencer's Butte. Although the lecture schedule was fairly full on, there were evening trips to watch the local minor league baseball team (up the Emeralds), and a whole host of board games to enjoy.

Overall, it was a really great experience for which we were all very grateful! Attending the future iterations of OPLSS would certainly be useful for anybody working on/wanting to expand their knowledge on logic, type theory, and formal verification. It is worth noting that recordings and notes from this year’s lectures, as well as those from previous years, are all available to view online: https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/summerschool/summer23/topics.php



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