TITLE: An Undergraduate Research Project for Spring AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: January 11, 2017 2:22 PM DESC: ----- BODY: Coming into the semester, I didn't have any students doing their undergraduate research under my supervision. That frees up some time each week, which is nice, but leaves my semester a bit poorer. Working with students one-on-one is one of the best parts of this job, even more so in relief against administrative duties. Working on these projects makes my weeks better, even when I don't have as much time to devote to them as I'd like. Yesterday, a student walked in with a project that makes my semester a little busier -- and much more interesting. Last summer, he implemented some ideas on extensible effects in Haskell and has some ideas for ways to make the system more efficient. This student knows a lot more about extensible effects and Haskell than I do, so I have some work to do just to get ready to help. I'll start with Extensible Effects: An Alternative to Monad Transformers, the paper by Oleg Kiselyov and his colleagues that introduced the idea to the wider computing community. This paper builds on work by Cartwright and Felleisen, published over twenty years ago, which I'll probably look at, too. The student has a couple of other things for me to read, which will appear in his more formal proposal this week. I expect that these papers will make my brain hurt, in the good way, and am looking forward to diving in. In the big picture, most undergrad projects in my department are pretty minor as research goes. They are typically more D than R, with students developing something that goes beyond what they learn in any course and doing a little empirical analysis. The extensible effects project is much more ambitious. It builds on serious academic research. It works on a significant problem and proposes something new. That makes the project much more exciting for me as the supervisor. I hope to report more later, as the semester goes on. -----