Kevin Hammond

Technical Manager, Input-Output Global (IOG)

Kevin Hammond leads the technical effort on Cardano at Input-Output Global (IOG). His research interests lie in programming language design and implementation, with a focus on parallelism and real-time properties of functional languages, including modelling and reasoning about extra-functional properties, using type-based approaches. In total, he has published around 130 research papers, books and articles, and held over 20 national and international research grants, totalling around £11M of research funding, including coordinating several large EU projects. He was a member of the Haskell design committee, co-designed the Hume real-time functional language, and is co-editor of the main reference text on parallel functional programming. targeting heterogeneous parallel architectures. Kevin is a keen hill-walker, whisky connoisseur and enjoys early music. He is interested in how functional programming can be used to improve AI techniques and improve explainability of AI models.

Much effort is spent building software that can NEVER work because its basic design requirements are contradictory, poorly defined, or simply not understood. No amount of software engineering effort will ever overcome these fundamental limitations. Ensuring quality & performance is especially problematic. Our contention, backed by substantial industrial experience (including Vodafone & the Broadband Forum), is that good functional programming principles and practices, including compositionally (of probabilistic models), separation of concerns & strong semantics can be hugely beneficial in designing as well as developing such systems. The talk describes the ΔQSD metrics-based, quality-centric design methodology and workbench and show how it was used to develop a successful real-time globally distributed blockchain network implementation (Cardano) in Haskell.

Overall, ΔQSD has saved millions of dollars of wasted effort, ensuring that software systems fully meet their requirements.

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