Philip Saville headshot

Philip Saville

Department of Informatics, University of Sussex

p.(lastname)@sussex.ac.uk. My previous email address, (firstname).(lastname)@cs.ox.ac.uk, will stop working as of September 2024. After that I will have no access to emails sent to this address.

Departmental webpage: sussex.ac.uk/profiles/643094; OrcID: 0000-0002-8320-0280


I am an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Sussex. Until September 2024 I was a post-doc with Sam Staton at the University of Oxford. Previously I was a post-doc at the University of Edinburgh working with Ohad Kammar as part of the grant Effectful theories of programming languages: models, abstractions, validation. Before that I was a PhD student under Marcelo Fiore at the University of Cambridge.

Research interests

I am a theoretical computer scientist interested in category theory and its applications to the foundations of programming language theory. My work has two common themes: (1) using ideas from logic to study the structure of programming languages; (2) using ideas from algebra to study the relationships between denotational models, and hence better understand common techniques in semantics. In particular, my interests include:
  1. Categorical semantics of programming languages, especially semantic models that contain extra information over traditional models (e.g. 2-dimensional models) and the algebraic foundations of techniques such as logical relations.
  2. Categorical universal algebra, including multi-ary semantic models such as clones and multicategories.
  3. Higher-dimensional categories: their internal languages, proofs of coherence, and applications to rewriting theory and proof theory.

Publications

Preprints

Thesis

Cartesian closed bicategories: type theory and coherence, supervised by Marcelo Fiore. Examined by Steve Awodey (external) and Martin Hyland (internal), 24th March 2020.

Selected talks

Teaching

I am generally interested in supervising projects on topics around theoretical computer science -- feel free to email me if you are interested!