Stephen Mell

Stephen Mell is a PhD student in computer science (programming languages and machine learning). He thinks that some ideas from linear logic and type theory could inform the theoretical discussion of abstractions. He is working on a type theory for abstractions (see termgraph workshop paper) that can represent rich structured data (like Church encodings, but beyond trees). Concerns have been raised that this is hazardous, as it might lead to novel neural network architectures on code (RNNs and tree RNNs are uses of Church-encoded lists and trees, and thus might produce an analogous architecture on structured representations of code). He’s looking to get feedback on (1) whether this is promising and (2) whether this is dangerous.

Keywords

• Linear logic
• Church encoding
• Graphs