Conal Elliott

Recent

October 2011	I'm working at Tabula and having a great time.
May 2009	Paper: Push-pull functional reactive programming
March 2009	Paper: Beautiful differentiation
March 2009	Paper: Denotational design with type class morphisms
January 2008	New technical blog
November 2007	Google tech talk: Tangible Functional Programming: a modern marriage of usability and composability
October 2007	The paper Functional Reactive Animation was awarded as the most influential paper of ICFP '97.
July 2007	My paper Tangible Functional Programming was accepted and will appear in ICFP 2007. Paper slightly updated.
April 2007	I've moved from the Seattle area to San Andreas, CA

CV

Here is my CV as a PDF (updated February 10, 2011).

Publications

Research

Most of my research is aimed at supporting the creation of interactive synthetic media content, including computer animation, human-computer interaction, images, 2D and 3D geometry, and programmable shaders. In all cases, I aim to preserve or improve on the flexibility and performance of mainstream programming approaches, while greatly simplifying the creation process.

Synthetic media programs are almost always implemented in sequential, imperative (often object-oriented) languages. My research explores use of declarative languages, resulting in much simpler and more reusable and composable programs. These languages are also more amenable to execution on parallel architectures such as modern graphics processors, because declarative languages abstract away from order of execution, removing the accidental sequentiality found in imperative programs. Even on sequential machines, declarative formulations have much simpler mathematical semantics, which facilitates automatic optimization. They also tend to be spatially and temporally continuous (resolution-independent), allowing them to adapt naturally to machines with different speeds and display resolutions.

After exploring explicit programming of synthetic media content for several years, I'm now also keenly interested in supporting artists. The goal of my new research agenda is to give artists access to the expressive power of computers and programming languages, while retaining an artist's working style. I mean "artist" in a broad sense, in contrast to the verbal and sequential style of an engineer. (I don't mean to suggest that people fit neatly into these two categories.) My ideal audience includes graphic designers, musicians, and children -- really, the playful and curious in all of us.

Some past projects:

• I was in the Graphics Group of Microsoft Research during 1994-2002. My last project there was a high-level language and optimizing compiler for computations on graphics processors, called Vertigo.
• From mid 1999 to 2001, I worked with Sigbjorn Finne and Oege de Moor on image synthesis, via a system we call Pan.
• Previously I concentrated on declarative modeling for interactive graphics and multimedia. The main tangible result is a system called Fran. Here is a tutorial article on Composing Reactive Animations. (The animated GIFs total 2Mb. Please be patient. You might want to download the zip file and view it locally.) Fran and its predecessor ActiveVRML were the first realizations of the paradigm now known as "functional reactive programming".
• During 1989-1994, I worked at Sun Microsystems, and was the primary designer and a co-implementor of TBAG, which served as the inspiration of some of the principles of Fran.
• I am a member of IFIP Working Group 2.8, and have served on the program committees for ICFP '99 and PADL '00 and PPDP '01, and the 2002 Haskell Workshop.

Academic Background

• Ph.D. 1990 from Carnegie Mellon University. School of Computer Science. My dissertation was Extensions and Applications of Higher-Order Unification. I also worked on Lambda Prolog, a higher-order logic programming language.
• B.A. 1982 from University of California at Santa Barbara, in the College of Creative Studies, majoring in mathematics.

Compassionate Communication

Since April of 2003, I have been learning and practicing nonviolent communication (NVC), also called "compassionate communication". NVC is a consciousness and small set of inner and outer practices designed to nurture compassion in ourselves and others by how we speak and listen. Together with my partner Holly, I do training, mediation, and empathic listening for groups, couples, and individuals. Our working partnership is called Awakening Compassion.

My interest is in living and sharing the consciousness of NVC, rather than a particular process or model, i.e., the "sacred place" rather than the "raft". (See this story.) For this reason, I have chosen internal rather than external certification and have seeded two community-open web sites aimed at evolving NVC practice into deeper alignment with NVC consciousness.

• Emergence of NVC: a Life-inspired, self-organizing (power-with) vision for sharing and evolving NVC. See discussion group.
• NVC Evolves: a blog-space for explorations in evolving the understanding, living, and teaching of NVC. See discussion group.

Personal

I have four children: Jake (27), Becky (25), Charlotte (23), and Patrick (20) (ages as of May 2010). My parents are on the web, too. I love ballroom dance.

Here are some of my favorite quotations.

And here are my online photo collections.

A while back, I played around with making some silly photo collages. Here is a small gallery of examples, with simple instructions to do your own. Nothing serious here.

Miscellany

I first saw this spiky ball high up on a rotating post in a used car lot somewhere in Florida. Here are a bigger version (256x256, 24 bit, 30f/s AVI, 866 KB), and a really big version (512x512, 2.15MB). Turn on the auto-repeat property in the AVI viewer to keep it running.

See the web site of Fr. Magnus Wenninger, OSB, containing pictures of many beautiful polyhedra he has constructed by hand. I had the honor of meeting Fr. Wenninger during the Mosaic 2000 conference in Seattle. Here is a polyhedron he made while there.

Contact Information

If my conal-dot-net email breaks, please resend to conal.elliott-at-gmail-dot-com.

You can also catch me via Yahoo! Messenger (conal_elliott), AIM (Conal WA), GoogleTalk (firstname.lastname), or #haskell IRC (conal).

I am on Twitter, FaceBook, FriendFeed, and Linked-in. I have an Amazon wish list.

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