Tomas Petricek — Materials for Evaluation

International Experience

• Lecturer, University of Kent, 2018 – 2022

  As a member of the Programming Languages and Systems group, I worked on making programming with data easy, trustworthy and accessible. I applied for grants from EPSRC (UK) and ERC (EU), Dstl & GCHQ (UK), taught graduate and undergraduate modules, supervised a PhD student and initiated interdisciplinary collaboration with a colleagues from Department of Philosophy.

• Collaborating Fellow and Visiting Researcher, The Alan Turing Institute, 2016 – 2020

  I led a project Programming Tools for Open Data Journalism funded through Google Digital News Initiative, joined the flagship ATI project Artificial Intelligence for Data Analytics as a co-investigator and obtained funding from Dstl and GCHQ for a follow-up project on semi-automated data wrangling.

• Post-doctoral Researcher and Contractor, Microsoft Research Cambridge, 2014 – 2016

  I led the development of an open-source projects focused on doing data science with F#. Resulting research was awarded a Distinguished Paper award and selected as an SIGPLAN Research Highlight.

• Intern, BlueMountain Capital Management, New York, August 2013 – November 2013

  Developed Deedle, an open-source data and time-series analytics library for .NET and integrated it into existing codebase, replacing earlier technologies; the library has been adopted at BlueMountain and externally.

• PhD, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, 2011 – 2016

  Thesis Context-aware Programming Languages develops coeffects, a theory for tracking information about environment in which programs are executed. I also devised a novel way of presenting the results in the form of widely read interactive essay (tomasp.net/coeffects). Supervised by Prof. Alan Mycroft.

• Research Intern, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, April 2007 – July 2007 and October 2008 – April 2009

  Contributed to the development of F# tooling for Visual Studio, designed an F# language extension for parallel, asynchronous and concurrent programming and prototyped novel approach to multi-tier web development.

Research Projects

Research Funding

• PRIMUS Research Programme, Charles University (Principal Investigator), 2024 – 2028

  Awarded €610,000 for research on Types for data-centric programming to cover 60% FTE of my time, two post-docs for 24 months each and 2 PhD students for the duration of the project.

  Project Outputs

  • 1 PhD student and 1 post-doc joined the research group in April 2024 and May 2024.
  • Workshop paper submitted to HATRA '24 workshop at the SPLASH 2024 conference

• Fellowship, ACM History Committee, 2018

  Awarded $4000 to study the history of programming errors, looking at technical, formal and social means for mitigating them, resulting in a work-in-progress book Cultures of Programming.

  Project Outputs

  • Draft paper, serving as the basis for Cambridge University Press monograph Cultures of Programming

• Dstl & GCHQ grants, The Alan Turing Institute (Principal Investigator), 2017 – 2020

  Awarded £420,000 for research on tooling for data science to cover a post-doc for 6 months, Research Software Engineer for 3 years, 3 summer interns, my salary/buyout for 1 day/week.

  Project Outputs

  • 3 top-tier papers in POPL, JFP, VL/HCC and workshop papers in TaPP
  • Three open-source software packages (wrattler.org, compostjs.github.io and turing.thegamma.net)

• Innovation Fund, Google Digital News Initiative (Principal Investigator), 2016

  Awarded €50,000 for research on Programming tools for data journalism. My proposal was selected as one of 128 out of 1,200 and allowed me to develop an independent research project at The Alan Turing Institute.

  Project Outputs

  • Paper in ECOOP, extended abstracts in digital journalism venues, openn-source software (thegamma.net)
  • Workshop hosted at The Alan Turing Institute bringing together journalists, academics and policy makers

Project Participation

• Language, Picture, Gesture: Forms of Discursivity (Junior Researcher), UNCE, MFF UK (2024 – present)

  Studying programming and interactive systems from a broader inter-disciplinary perspective.

  Project Outputs

  • Talk Interactive Programming as a Shift from Language to Gesture at a project conference in autumn 2024.

• ExtremeXP (Member), Horizon Europe, MFF UK (2023 – present)

  Contributing to the design of novel data visualization tools and gamification systems.

  Project Outputs

  • Novel visualization design, presented at an internal project meeting.

• PROGRAMme: What is a computer program? (Member), ANR France (2017 – present)

  Interdisciplinary collaborative project, serving as co-editor for the resulting work-in-progress book.

  Project Outputs

  • Collaborative manuscript What is a computer program? submitted to a potential publisher.
  • Participation in the project inspired invited talk at ASL/APA Meeting in San Francisco.

• AIDA: AI in Data Science (Co-Investigator), The Alan Turing Institute (2016 – 2018)

  Joined and reshaped the project to allow integration of work by 3 post-docs and 1 PhD student.

  Project Outputs

  • Collaboration resulted in a joint paper in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

Scientific Supervision

• Aleks Boruch-Gruszecki (Post-doctoral Researcher), Charles University, 2024 – present

  Co-supervised with Prof Jan Vitek.

• Joel Jakubovic (Post-doctoral Researcher), Charles University, 2024 – present

  Research topic Graphical Constraint Programming for Notational Freedom.

• Roly Perera (Post-doctoral Researcher), The Alan Turing Institute, 2019

  Program change tracking with applications in AI research. Now at University of Cambridge.