Sam Staton

A photo of me
Sam Staton
Professor of Computer Science
Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford

Room 421
Wolfson Building, Parks Road
Oxford OX1 3QD

Senior Research Fellow, Jesus College, Oxford

+44 (0)1865 (2)73893
sam.staton at cs.ox.ac.uk

Interests: My research is in programming language theory, and I'm also interested in logic and category theory. I've recently been especially interested in two kinds of programming language:

Aside from these recent interests, I've been involved in various foundational aspects of programming language theory. One key theme has been computational monads and algebraic theories: This line of work stems from the observation that notions of computation can be determined by program equations using techniques from universal algebra. I have presented new algebraic frameworks to analyze program equations for quantum computation (POPL 2015), jumps (LICS 2014), local store and pi-calculus (LICS 2013, FOSSACS 2010 and MFPS 2009) and functional logic programming (FOSSACS 2013). See FOSSACS 2019 for a program logic, and WACT 2014 for a categorical perspective. I've also been involved in game semantics (LICS 2014) and categorical operational semantics (e.g. LICS 2008, LICS 2006, LMCS 2011).

Quick biography: I've been in Oxford since March 2015. Between 2015-2022 I was supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Before that, I spent time in Nijmegen (NL) on Bart Jacobs' ERC project Quantum Computation, Logic, and Security (2013–14), in Paris on the CHOCO project (2010–11), and in Cambridge as a lecturer (2010–13), on a EPSRC research fellowship (2007–10), as a postdoc (2006–07), a PhD student (with Marcelo Fiore, 2002–06) and an undergraduate.

(Jump down for more CV-related info.)

Publications and preprints

Research Associates and Students

Courses taught: Principles of Programming Languages in Oxford. Statistical Probabilistic Programming at Oxford, jointly with Luke Ong, Hugo Paquet and Paolo Perrone. Probabilistic Programming at Oregon PL Summer School 2019. A course on coalgebra jointly with Alexandra Silva in Nijmegen. Courses on Discrete mathematics I, Semantics of programming languages, and Category theory and logic in Cambridge.

Responsibilities and events

Steering committees: IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS, 2015-); Formal Structures in Computation and Deduction (FSCD, 2017-2020). Organizing committee of Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics (MFPS, 2022-).

Editorial board member: ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing.

Programme committee member: 32nd EACSL Annual Conference on Computer Science Logic 2024 (CSL 2024); 50th EATCS International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2023); PC co-chair: 6th Annual Conference on Applied Category Theory (ACT 2023); 26th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures (FOSSACS 2023); 7th International Conference on Formal Structures for Computation and Deduction (FSCD 2022); 49th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2022); 30th European Symposium on Programming (ESOP 2021); 25th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2020); 24th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2019); 4th International Conference on Formal Structures for Computation and Deduction (FSCD 2019); PC chair: 34th Conference on Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics (MFPS XXXIV); 42nd International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2017); 44th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2017); 26th European Symposium on Programming (ESOP 2017); Workshop on Syntax and Semantics of Low-level Languages (LOLA 2016); 10th International Workshop on Fixed Points in Computer Science (FICS 2015); 6th Conference on Algebra and Coalgebra in Computer Science (CALCO 2015); PC co-chair: 30th Conference on Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics (MFPS XXX); 3rd ACM-SIGPLAN Workshop on Higher-Order Programming with Effects (HOPE 2014); Combined 21st International Workshop on Expressiveness in Concurrency and 11th Workshop on Structured Operational Semantics (EXPRESS/SOS 2014); 11th International Workshop on Domain Theory and Applications (Domains XI); 18th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2013); Workshop on Syntax and Semantics of Low-Level Languages (LOLA 2013); 5th Conference on Algebra and Coalgebra in Computer Science (CALCO 2013); 21st Conference on Computer Science Logic (CSL 2012), 4th Workshop on Mathematically Structured Functional Programming (MSFP 2012); 11th International Workshop on Coalgebraic Methods in Computer Science (CMCS 2012); 9th Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2011); 4th Conference on Algebra and Coalgebra (CALCO 2011); 8th International Workshop on Structural Operational Semantics (SOS 2011); 7th International Workshop on Structural Operational Semantics (SOS 2010). External review committee of 39th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2012).

Organizing committees: Scientific committee: Logic of Probabilistic Programming at CIRM (Jan 2022). Local organizer: LICS 2018; FSCD 2017; CALCO 2015 and MFPS XXXI; International Conference on Category Theory (CT 2014); Informal Workshop on Programming with Handlers (Cambridge June 2013).

Some recent/upcoming invited or keynote talks: PROBPROG Sep 2023; VERIPROP 2023; BCS-FACS 2022 Seminar; LAFI 2022; CMCS 2022; FSCD 2021; MFPS 2021; OWLS Jan 2021; CPS 2020; OPLSS 2019; CIE 2019; PIHOC 2019; ICALP 2018; STOC 2018; Logic and learning 2018; British Logic Colloquium 2017; Uncertainty in Computation, 2016; QSLC 2016; WIP 2016; MFPS 2016; CHOCOLA, Jan 2016; S-REPLS2, Nov 2015; MFPS 2015.