Simon Foster, University of Sheffield

Introduction

I am a PhD student studying for in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield in the UK. My supervisor is Dr. Mike Stannett and I am member of the Verification and Testing Group. The title of my thesis is A Compositional Algebraic Theory for Service Composition, which in many ways continues the work I took part in over the last year of my undergraduate masters degree - the Cashew project.

My interests lie in Process Algebra (in particular time and preemption), Composite Web-Service Orchestration, Workflow Semantics and the use of the purely functional programming language Haskell for all of the above. Currently I'm working on a semantics for a workflow based language which I've created and the development of my Process Algebra CaSiE.

The various projects I'm working on can be found below.

Source Projects

CaSE / Cashew-Nuts Implementation

ConCalc (part of the above)

HCl - A Collection Library for Haskell

HAIFA - An XML based interoperability toolkit, mostly focused on web-services. Somewhat outdated, but still probably functional. This was my third year undergraduate project.

All my Haskell sources use Cabal as the build system.

Contact Details

My email address is S DOT Foster AT dcs DOT shef DOT ac DOT uk (replace " DOT " with . and " AT " with @). Alternatively I can be reached by snail mail at the departmental address.

You can usually find me in RLab1 at the department (the VT lab).

Publications

Modelling Compensation with Timed Process Algebra (pdf)
Simon Foster
2nd Young Researchers Workshop on Service Oriented Computing (YR-SOC 2007) pp. 31-37

HAIFA: An XML Based Interoperability Solution for Haskell (dvi, ps, pdf)
Simon Foster
6th Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming (TFP 2005) pp. 103-118
Tartu University Press (ISBN 9985-894-88-X)

A Compositional Operational Semantics for OWL-S (dvi, ps, pdf)
Barry Norton, Simon Foster, Andrew Hughes
2nd International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods (WS-FM 2005)
LNCS 3670

Composition and Semantic Enhancement of Web-Services : The CASheW-s Project (dvi, ps, pdf)
Simon Foster, Andrew Hughes, Barry Norton
1st Young Researchers Workshop on Service Oriented Computing (YR-SOC 2005) pp. 29-32
Presentation (pdf)

Selected Talks

Service Composition Algebra (pdf)
Simon Foster Given at University of Leicester PhD Seminar, 22 October 2007

A Formal Model for Web-Service Composition (pdf)
Given at BCTCS 2006, 6th April 2006

Implementation of a Timed Process Calculus in Haskell (pdf)
Given at the DCS Theory SIG, 25th November 2005

Selected Posters

Cashew: Composition, Verification and Semantic Enhancement of Web-Services (pdf)
Simon Foster
Presented at the DCS Research Retreat, May 25th 2006