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PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE SEMANTICS & COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

Professor Jack B. Dennis (right) discusses research problems with graduate students David Misunas (left) and Clement Leung. Professor Dennis, who heads the Computation Structures Group, is inter- ested in computer systems architecture, semantic foun- dations for computer pro- grams, and modularity in software and hardware.

The Computation Structures Group searches for novel structures and associated theories in order to exploit parallelism and asynchronous computation in the hardware domain; to provide a sound semantic foundation for the software side; and to insure efficient deadlock-free operation of the aggregate. Promising applications of this research include the efficient utili- zation of the increasingly available, inexpensive microprocessors with a reduced programming effort.


Professor Jonathan Allen, who is an affiliate member of the Laboratory, is inter- ested in computer architec- ture and natural language processing. Professor Allen is also responsible for the academic undergraduate program in Computer Science and Engineering.


Professor Clarence (Skip) A. Ellis' research interests are in parallelism in computer systems, proofs of program correctness, and in both the theoretical and practical aspects of operating systems.


Professor Barbara Liskov and Professor Dennis discuss the programming language CLU, which is being developed by Professor Liskov. Besides programming languages, Professor Liskov's research interests include structured programming, software reliability, software system design, and operating systems.

The programming language CLU is a practical vehicle for study and development of approaches in structured programming. It provides a new linguistic mechanism, called a cluster, to support the use of data abstractions in program construction.


Professor Carl E. Hewitt is interested in the procedural embedding of knowledge and the semantics of computation primarily through the ACTOR message-passing model.

PLASMA, an implementation based on the ACTOR model, is being used to aid in the design and analysis of systems that consist of cooperating expert problem solving modules. Better semantic foundations such as ACTORS provide a basis for implementing more efficient programming methodologies and for gaining deeper insights into the structure of computation.




This 1975 MIT Lab for Computer Science Brochure was reconstructed in HTML by Peter Szolovits, 1995.
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