Arnar Birgisson
Previous education
B.Sc. of Mathematics, University of Iceland, graduate year 2004.
M.Sc. Thesis work
My MSc thesis is titled Topics in Structural Operational Semantics and was submitted and defended in May 2009. The link above leads to a PDF version of the thesis as well as my presentation slide deck. The thesis presents three independent projects; an implementation and semantics of Transactional Memory Introspection in Haskell and SOS, decompositionality results for a process algebra and logic which includes a detailed notion of computation history and SOS rule formats for determinism and idempotency.
My supervisor is Luca Aceto.
Current research interests
My current M.Sc. thesis work and related research are in process algebra. Other interests include concurrency theory in general, programming languages, type theory, use of logic in computer science and modeling and verification.
On the practical side I am interested in paradigms for concurrent programming such as asynchronous message passing systems, software transactional memory and other alternatives and extensions to shared-memory threads. Also (programming/domain-specific) language processing, compiler construction and dynamic programming environments.
Going outside the scope of my education I also have a weak spot for electronics of all sorts, playing microprocessors and general DIY hacking.
Teaching
I have previously been a TA for the following courses at RU.
Spring 2008: Algorithm design and analysis, T-604-HGRE. Administered weekly excercise sessions. 2nd-3rd year elective course of B.Sc. in CS.
Spring 2008: Computer Science II (3-week intensive course). Administered daily excercise sessions and helped with course design (first-time Python was used). 1st year of engineering programs.
Spring 2009: Introduction to Aritificial Intelligence. Administer weekly lab sessions and compose assignments and teaching material for AI programming in LISP, Prolog and others.
Further information
This website contains pages on some of my projects, list of publications and contact information.
My CV in PDF form can be downloaded here.
Personal stuff
Besides all that CS and programming nonsense I enjoy photography, as witnessed on my Flickr page, driving around my beautiful country in my jeep and playing the piano (well, pretending to play at least).
Besides flickr, I'm also to be found in various online places:
This website
If you are anything like me, you like technical details. This website runs on a Ubuntu Linux virtual machine hosted by Linode. The software is a small home-brewn Django project pulling bits and pieces from around the web. Django itself runs on top of Apache via mod_wsgi and the data is stored in a MySQL database.
Georg Brandl generously allowed me to steal his CSS and design ideas from the Pygments website, thanks Georg! Pygments also handles the highlighting of all code on this site (erhm... it will, when there is some code :).
