Jana Dunfield

I'm an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. My research area is the theory and practice of programming languages, building type systems that make software better: refinement type systems catch more bugs; languages for incremental computation can asymptotically improve performance with little programmer effort. Bidirectional typing has been a key technical ingredient in much of my work. My PhD is from Carnegie Mellon with Frank Pfenning, followed by a series of non-tenure-track positions at McGill, MPI-SWS and UBC. For more details, see my CV (last updated April 2020). Until 2020, I published under a different first name. I can't control what publishers do, but I am correcting my name in copies under my control. If you cite me, please use my current name. If you are citing a sole-authored paper of mine and need to use a pronoun, please use she/her/her/hers/herself.

Electric trolleybus in Vancouver.

Research ← list of publications

• Polarized type systems, with Dimitrios Economou and Neel Krishnaswami.
• Gradual typing and refinement types, with Khurram A. Jafery. POPL 2017.
• Bidirectional typechecking, type inference and polymorphism, with Neel Krishnaswami (ICFP 2013; POPL 2019; draft survey).
• Incremental computation, with Matthew Hammer and his students at University of Colorado Boulder (OOPSLA 2015, and a new draft paper).
• Extensible datasort refinements and pattern matching. ESOP 2017.
• Intersection types for evaluation-order polymorphism. ICFP 2015.

Teaching

• Fall 2020:
  • CISC 360: Programming Paradigms (most material available from onQ)
• Winter 2020 (Jan.-Apr. 2020):
  • CISC 465/865: Semantics of Programming Languages
• Older teaching

News

2018:

Sound and complete bidirectional typechecking for higher-rank polymorphism with existentials and indexed types was accepted to POPL 2019.

NSERC increased my Discovery award to $33,000/year.

Was awarded a Discovery grant ($26,000/year for 5 years) from NSERC/CRSNG.

2017: Moved to Kingston and joined the School of Computing at Queen's.

2016: Completed a draft on refinement types for incremental computation.

"Extensible datasort refinements" was accepted to ESOP 2017.

"Sums of Uncertainty: Refinements go gradual" was accepted to POPL 2017. My coauthor, Khurram A. Jafery, received a 2017 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher award.

2015: "Incremental computation with names" appeared at OOPSLA 2015. "Elaborating evaluation-order polymorphism" appeared at ICFP 2015.

All papers and publications

Software

• Stardust, a compiler from a language with intersection and union types to Standard ML

Random bits

Contact