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Who I am

I am a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh, working in the areas of databases and programming languages.

From September 2004 until October 2008 I was a postdoctoral research associate in the Database Group. I have also been involved with the Digital Curation Centre and during 2008-2009 I organized a Theme Program on Principles of Provenance for the eScience Institute.

I earned my PhD in Computer Science at Cornell University in August 2004. From January to May 2003 I visited Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory. In the summer of 2001 I worked at Intertrust on a summer internship. I have a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics (May 1998) and MS in Mathematics (August 1998) from Carnegie Mellon University.

Before that I lived in Wisconsin, land of cheese.

Note to prospective research students: I am interested in supervising new PhD students or externally funded summer research internships. If you are interested in a PhD in LFCS, please write to me describing how your research interests would align with mine and read the instructions for applying for admission and external funding. I do not have much spare funding for summer research internships or visits but if your degree program already provides basic funding for a visit and you are interested in visiting Edinburgh please get in touch.

Suggested PhD research topics:

• XQuery/Update static analysis
• Provenance, programming languages and security
  A Microsoft Research funded PhD studentship is available in this area; please see further information here.
• Provenance, curation and archiving for scientific data
• Nominal logic, automated reasoning and type theory

Teaching

• Spring 2013: Querying and Storing XML
• Fall 2009, 2010, 2011: Logic Programming
• Fall 2005: Database Theory Postgraduate Course
• Fall 2005: Database Theory Postgraduate Course

Research

My research interests include:

• Databases and data provenance
• Programming languages and compilers
• Generic programming
• Logic and automated theorem proving
• Compression and information theory
• XML and related technologies

Current projects

• I'm a member of the W3C Provenance Interchange Working Group, including the PROV-O ontology and formal semantics
• The Database Wiki system.
• Formalizations of XQuery, LF, simple nominal type theory, and adequacy for higher-order abstract syntax using the nominal datatype package
• Logic programming in Nominal Logic (AlphaProlog)
• Provenance and preservation models for digital libraries and scientific databases
• XML update languages and typechecking

Professional Activities

• POPL 2014, PC member
• CSF 2013, PC member
• XLDI 2012, co-organizer
• TaPP 2013, steering comittee member
• ICDT 2013, PC member

Contact information

E-mail:	jcheney at inf dot ed dot ac dot uk
Phone:	07891 708 737 (M) 0131 651 5658 (O)
Address:	Informatics Forum 5.29 Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science School of Informatics 10 Crichton Street Edinburgh EH8 9AB Scotland, UK