Dr Raymond Hu

Research

Programming languages, Distributed programming, Type systems, Session types, Behavioural types

Interests

Recent and current topics

See my Google Scholar page for a more complete publication list.
Here are some selected topics and publications.

• Design and implementation of generics for the Go programming language. Go is a programming language developed by Google, and used by many companies and organisations globally. This work is a collaboration between researchers and the Go Team at Google. The impact includes contributing to the final design of generics released in Go 1.18.
  
  • Generics and static monomorphisation.
    https://doi.org/10.1145/3428217
  • Generics, structural subtyping and boxing in low-level Go.
    https://doi.org/10.1145/3776721
• Theory, implementation and applications of session types. This line of work has developed languages and practical tools for formal specification and safe programming of message passing protocols for concurrent and distributed systems. It stems from industry collaborations with Red Hat, Cognizant and the Ocean Observatories Initiative.
  
  • Rate-safe session types for embedded systems and Internet-of-Things.
    https://doi.org/10.1145/3754449
    https://doi.org/10.1145/3622854
    
  • Failure handling and fault tolerance.
    https://doi.org/10.1145/3485501
    https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89884-1_28
  • Refinement types for communication protocols.
    https://doi.org/10.1145/3428216
    https://doi.org/10.1145/3178372.3179495
  • Communication protocols parameterised on the number of participants.
    https://doi.org/10.1145/3290342
• Run-time deadlock verification for phasers. A generalisation of the concept of synchronisation barrier in concurrent programming that allows processes to asynchronously advance to later synchronisation phases ahead of their peers.
  https://doi.org/10.1145/3229060

Recent news

• I enjoyed participating with excellent researchers in the insightful and stimulating Dagstuhl seminar on Behavioural Types for Resilience (Feb '26)
• Our paper on the design and implementation of Go (Welterweight Go) is accepted at POPL '26
• I have a paid Research Training project (see S&E -- Computer Science) available for an excellent UG student this summer (2026) under the STRIDE programme at QMUL. Contact me if interested
• I'm presenting our work on mixed-choice in multiparty session types at S-REPLS at Amazon (Oct '25) -- see you there if you're going
• The extended and full version of our work on rate-based session types for IoT systems is published in TOPLAS
• I am helping to organise TIME 2025 at QMUL. Please consider submitting, submission deadline 20th May!
• I am a Programme Committee member for PLACES '25, please consider submitting and I look forward to reading your papers!
• I was a jury member for the PhD exam of Carlos Jorge Velez Mão de Ferro, whose thesis has been approved with distinction. Congratulations, Dr de Ferro!
• Our paper on timed session programming in Erlang is accepted at ERLANG '24
• My project student Dawid Lachowicz won the Kohei Honda Prize for his Final Year Project on extending Go with generic arrays. Congratulations, Dawid!
• I participated and learned a lot at the Dagtushl Seminar “Next Generation Protocols for Heterogeneous Systems” (Jan '24)
• My co-authors Grant Iraci and Cheng-En Chuang won a prize in the Russell L. Agrusa Student Innovation Competition at the University at Buffalo for our work on rate-based session types
• I am co-chair of the PLACES '24 workshop (part of ETAPS '24) with Diana Costa. Please consider submitting and attending!
• Our software artifact for our paper at OOPSLA '23 won the OOPSLA Distinguished Artifact award!
• I was a discussion panel member at the ST30 "30 Years of Session Types" workshop at SPLASH '23.
• I received a "Best early-career educator" award (2023/24) from the School of EECS at QMUL
• Our paper on event-driven multiparty session actors is accepted at HOPE '23
• Our paper on rate-safe session types for embedded systems and IoT is accepted at OOPSLA '23
• I gave an invited talk on failure handling with session types at the Stardust Project meeting (Sep '22)
• I was a member of the PhD Committee for Malte Viering, whose thesis has been accepted with the grade of "excellent" (summa cum laude). Congratulations, Dr Viering!
• I gave an invited seminar at the University of Kent about our work on session types for fault-tolerant event-driven programming (Dec '21)
• I participated in the Dagstuhl Seminar "Behavioural Types: Bridging Theory and Practice" (Sep '21)
• Our paper on session types for fault-tolerant event-driven programming is accepted at OOPSLA '21

General research interests

Programming languages
Distributed programming
Concurrency and communication
Message passing
Type systems
Session types
Behavioural types

Publications

2026

2025

2024

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Research Group

News