My PhD Oral Exam Slides

These are my PhD oral exam slides (used in May). They contain some of my most important (and secret) ideas. Now I share them with everybody partly because my head is overflowing with secrets ;-)

What these slides will tell you:

1. Some rarely known intuitions about Hindley-Milner type inference
2. What is fundamentally wrong with let-polymorphism and how to fix it
3. The reason why we have Curry-Howard correspondence
4. The relationship between program analysis and Hoare Logic (Separation Logic)
5. The relationship between Linear Logic and intersection types
6. The relationship between automatic theorem proving and supercompilation

What is the value of this line of work? It seems that I haven't invented anything new. But I think the academia has been focusing too much on creation. We already have too many concepts, and many of them don't really have separate essences. It is my job to unify them and simplify them.

I'm sure some of the ideas here are deep and publishable, but I don't have much motivation writing academic papers. I don't even think academic papers are the right way to explain ideas and let people understand them. Animations and mind maps are much better. The slides are probably still too brief to be of use to people who havent worked deeply in those topics. If you find some of them interesting and want to use them as a paper/dissertation topic, please don't hesitate to ask me for help.

Thanks to my new friend Keynote, all the animations in the original PPT file was successfully converted into PDF, and then converted into SlideShare. Have fun!