Hendrik van AntwerpenPosts
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PhD defense on 15 January
On Wednesday 15 January 2025 I’ll be defending my dissertation titled “Declarative Name Binding for Type System Specifications”. The defense starts at 17:00 CET and can be followed online (livestream).
A Dutch PhD defence is a very formal public ceremony. It usually starts with a more informal presentation to give the general audience, family and friends, an idea what the thesis topic is. After that the official defence starts. For exactly an hour the candidate is examined by the committee members, in decreasing order of geographical distance. The end of questioning is marked by the bedel (a sort of academic MC) announcing hora est (it is time). The committee retreats to decide the outcome of the defence. The diploma ceremony, if the degree is awarded, is held immediately, and the candidate walks out of the door diploma in hand.1
The topic of the dissertation is the design of a meta-language, Statix, to support high-level type specifications of programming languages with expressive name binding features, and automatically generate type checkers from those specifications. The dissertation is accompanied by a number of propositions that go beyond the contributions of the thesis, and reflect on the research more generally, as well as comment on societal issues. Follow these links to download the dissertation and propositions.
This will be the finale to a long process—I formally started my PhD back in 2015. I am grateful to Eelco Visser, who was my supervisor and who thaught me a lot until his untimely passing in 2022. I am thankful to Arie van Deursen and Jesper Cockx, who supervised me in the past year and supported me to finish the dissertation. And I want to thank the committee members, who have taken the time to read my dissertation and participate in the defence: Andrew Tolmach, Robby Findler, Görel Hedin, Wouter Swierstra, and Matthijs Spaan. These are just the people directly involved with the defense. There have been many more that have made this possible, which can (hopefully) all be found in the acknowledgements in the dissertation. I am looking forward to this defense and excited to finally wrap up what turned out to be an almost decade long project!
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This is very different from the tradition in for example the UK and the USA, where examinations are private, open-ended, and examinors can request (sometimes major) revisions. In the Dutch system, all committee members assess the dissertation beforehand. Major concerns about the work need to be addressed and those changes approved before the defence is even held. That is why dissertations in The Netherlands are already published before the defence. ↩
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Fast byte-pair encoding
Together with my colleague Alexander Neubeck we wrote a blog post about a fast byte-pair encoding algorithm he developed. Read it here: So many tokens, so little time: Introducing a faster, more flexible byte-pair tokenizer.