Conal’s home pageConal Elliott has been working (and playing) in functional programming since 1980. He especially enjoys applying semantic elegance and rigor to library design and optimized implementation. He invented the paradigm now known as “functional reactive programming” in the early 1990s, and then pioneered compilation techniques for high-performance, high-level embedded domain-specific languages, with applications including 2D and 3D computer graphics. The latter work included the first compilation of Haskell programs to GPU code, while maintaining precise and simple denotation and powerful composability, as well as a high degree of optimization. Conal earned a BA in math with honors from the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara in 1982 and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990. He previously worked as software architect at Sun Microsystems, graphics researcher at Microsoft Research, principal engineer at Tabula Inc (on chip specification and compiling Haskell to hardware for massively parallel execution), and distinguished data/AI scientist at Target. He has also coached couples and led conscious relationship workshops together with his partner Holly Croydon, with whom he now lives on 20 acres in the woods in the California Gold Country.

Conal is currently writing a book on how to design scalably reliable and efficient software and hardware with extremely simple specifications and machine-checked correctness, as well as mentoring and collaborating in this general area. For publications, CV, professional blog, etc, see http://conal.net.