My name is Florian Biermann I am about to graduate with a PhD in programming languages and parallel programming from the IT University of Copenhagen.

I have a masters in Software Development and Technology from the IT University of Copenhagen, a bachelor of science in Digital Media from the University of Bremen and studied Graphics Design at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University and . My Chinese name is 罗恩.

In August 2018, I will start as OCaml and C# developer at SimCorp within IBOR.

From July 2015 to June 2018 I was working as a PhD student on spreadsheet array programming as part of the Popular Parallel Programming project. My supervisor was Prof. Peter Sestoft. I was funded by the Sino-Danish Center for Education and Research.

Before that I have been working part-time as a programmer at Medical Insight (now part of Karos Health) and in the PitLab at ITU as a research assistant for Prof. John Paulin Hansen (who is now at DTU).

You can download my public key here.

My PhD Project

In my PhD project I work on the spreadsheet language Funcalc. My goal is to give spreadsheet users access to the parallel capabilities of their computing hardware without adding complex controlling structures.

Spreadsheets can be seen as declarative and purely-functional programs that are laid out in a two-dimensional grid. The overall idea is to use higher-order functions, that is functions that either accept other functions as arguments or produce a function as a result, on contiguous spreadsheet cells, so-called cell arrays. Computations on arrays occur often in scientific and financial computations. Many higher-order functions on arrays perform homogeneous computations; the same function is applied to every cell in the array.

Higher-order functions enable data-parallelism. In a purely-functional language, such as Funcalc, we know in advance that there is no interdependency between single cells of an array. Therefore, it is safe to parallelize certain computations on arrays transparently to the user. Their program will run faster without them having to do anything.

Furthermore, I am interested in making array programming easier for non-programmers by finding representations of arrays that cater to straightforward and simple programming solutions.

The results of my PhD project do not only apply to spreadsheets but may be interesting for other high-level programming languages such as the R language, Matlab or F#.

Things I did and do

Publications