Imperial students win top prizes at Programming 2018 conference

Daniel and Franklin receiving their awards. Picture credit: Toni Mattis

Two computing students won top prizes in the undergraduate track of the ACM Student Research Competition at the <Programming> 2018 conference.

Two Imperial College students in their 4th year of Computing, Franklin Schrans and Daniel Slocombe, participated and won top prizes in the undergraduate track of the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) at the Programming 2018 Conference in Nice, France.

Franklin Schrans won the First Prize for his work on Flint a new programming language he developed as part of his Masters thesis at Imperial.Flint is used to write decentralized applications (known as smart contracts) for the Ethereum platform, and comprises of a variety of novel safety-related features. The project is supervised by Prof. Susan Eisenbach and Prof. Sophia Drossopoulou. Franklin: “I had a great experience at this event, which was my first academic conference. I was happy to see the attendees’ excitement about Flint, and received great feedback as well.”

Daniel Slocombe won Third Prize for his work on the Pony Language
and the garbage collection system it uses (ORCA). As part of his Masters project he is extending the existing formal model of the ORCA
system to include elements from the Pony Runtime. The project was supervised by Prof. Sophia Drossopoulou, with help from Juliana Franco. Daniel: "Participating in the conference was a great opportunity for me to meet other people with similar interests, it also opened my eyes to several topics in the programming languages field. I'm really glad I entered the competition."

The competition, which took place during 9–12 April, consisted of multiple rounds in which participants had to submit an Extended Abstract, create and present a poster, and give a presentation in front of judges and conference attendees. Franklin will move on to the SRC Grand Finals, where he will be evaluated by a different panel of judges, and if chosen, he will be invited to the annual ACM Awards Banquet where he will receive formal recognition.

Franklin has also recently received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation and core developers of the Ethereum platform will be collaborating with him on Flint.