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Who I am

I am a Personal Chair of Programming Languages and Systems in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh, working in the areas of databases and programming languages. I am also a member of the Security and Privacy group in Informatics. I lead the Principles of Provenance group. From September 2018 to September 2023 I was a Turing Fellow and from 2018-2020 I was a Visiting Researcher at King's College, London.

From October 2008 until December 2016 I held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.

From September 2004 until October 2008 I was a postdoctoral research associate in the Database Group. I have also been involved with the Digital Curation Centre and during 2008-2009 I organized a Theme Program on Principles of Provenance for the eScience Institute.

I earned my PhD in Computer Science at Cornell University in August 2004. From January to May 2003 I visited Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory. In the summer of 2001 I worked at Intertrust on a summer internship. I have a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics (May 1998) and MS in Mathematics (August 1998) from Carnegie Mellon University.

Before that I lived in Wisconsin, land of cheese.

I maintain a research blog, which is updated sporadically.

PhD opportunities:

• PhD study

Teaching

• Spring 2024-25: Inf1: Object Oriented Programming mainly coursework
• Fall 2022-23, 2023-24, 2024-25: Elements of Programming Languages
• Fall 2015-17: Elements of Programming Languages (old course page)
• Spring 2014: Distributed Systems
• Spring 2013: Querying and Storing XML
• Fall 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014: Logic Programming
• Fall 2006: Database Theory Postgraduate Course
• Fall 2005: Database Theory Postgraduate Course

Research

My research interests include:

• Databases and data provenance
• Programming languages and compilers
• Generic programming
• Logic and automated theorem proving
• Compression and information theory
• XML and related technologies

Current research team

Please see my research group page.

Current projects

Past projects

• Probabilistic Property-Based Testing, funded by the Huawei Edinburgh Research Lab
• Skye: A programming language bridging theory and practice for scientific data curation, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant (2016-2023)
• A Diagnostics Approach to Advanced Persistent Threat Prevention (ADAPT), in collaboration with Galois, Inc., Xerox PARC, and Oregon State University, funded by DARPA's Transparent Computing research program (2015-2019)
• Foundations of Language-Integrated Query, including work on language-integrated provenance funded by a Google Research Award
• Declarative Programming for Data Science, studentship in the Edinburgh Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Science, co-funded by LogicBlox, Inc.
• Provenance for configuration language security (Microsoft Research), in collaboration with Paul Anderson (Edinburgh) and Dimitrios Vytiniotis (MSR)
• A Theory of Least Change for Bidirectional Transformations (EPSRC), in collaboration with Perdita Stevens, and James McKinna (Edinburgh) and Jeremy Gibbons (Oxford) (2013-2016)
• Language-based provenance security (AFOSR EOARD, 2013-2018)
• Mechanized metatheory using Nominal Logic Programming (AlphaProlog), funded by the Royal Society (2008-2016)
• DIACHRON: Provenance and archiving for Linked Data (EU FP7)
• XML update languages, static analysis, and typechecking (in collaboration with Michael Benedikt, Oxford)
• I was a member of the W3C Provenance Interchange Working Group. I helped present a recent tutorial on this at EDBT 2013 (paper), together with Paolo Missier and Khalid Belhajjame.
• Formalizations of XQuery, LF, simple nominal type theory, and adequacy for higher-order abstract syntax using the nominal datatype package, joint with Christian Urban and Stefan Berghofer
• The Database Wiki system (funded by Google Research Awards and University of Edinburgh support).

Professional Activities

• FSCD 2025 (PC member)
• POPL 2025 (PC member)
• ESOP 2025 (PC member)
• ICFP 2024 (PC member)
• TaPP 2024 (PC member)
• FSCD 2022 (PC member)

Contact information

E-mail:	jcheney at inf dot ed dot ac dot uk
Phone:	07891 708 737 (M) 0131 651 5658 (O)
Address:	Informatics Forum 5.29 Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science School of Informatics 10 Crichton Street Edinburgh EH8 9AB Scotland, UK