Abstract

Abstract: I’ll give an introduction to F#, a functional programming language that is very well suited to express complex ideas and problems. I’ll start with the key ideas of functional programming, and contrast simple examples with traditional programming languages such as Matlab or C. In addition, I will present two particular features of F# that make it very well suited for data intensive scientific computing: It is very easy to do parallel programming; and units of measure provide valuable sanity checks for mathematical expressions.

Biography: Anton Schwaighofer is working as an Applied Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft adCenter Redmond. His current area of focus is economic models of auction marketplaces in online advertising. He is a computer scientist by training, but moved on to work in statistical machine learning for his PhD (TU Graz, Austria). After working for some time on computational chemistry at the Intelligent Data Analysis group at a Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, he joined Microsoft Research in February 2008.