Research

There are many software development companies, but one aspect that distinguishishes us from many others is that we also actively participate in academic research. Of course, when working with customers, our focus is of course extremely pragmatic and we provide real-world services and solutions. However, when the time allows us, we like to exchange our ideas with the worldwide academic community.

Why do we find research important and how does it help deliver better services and products to you?

• Many practical ideas originate from research. For example, many of the modern financial modelling tools are based on years of research in functional languages. Thanks to being involved in academic research, we can benefit from the large pool of academic ideas that could, when applied in practice, make a real difference.
• Academic work is often focused on extracting the essence of an idea. Thinking about problems in this way makes it possible to understand what the core problems of a system are and how to approach those. Thinking about problems in simple terms is essential for avoiding over-engineered solutions that will never really work and are so frequent in the modern world of software development.

Research Areas

We are interested in several research areas that are closely related to the services and consulting we provide. This allows us to offer you advice and cutting edge technologies, which will give you a real competitive advantage. The following lists highlights several of the areas:

• Semantic web. The internet is full of information and accessing this information is the key building block of many modern applications. Unfortunately, data on the internet often lack solid structure, making it difficult to access them. The goal of semantic web is to add structure to the existing data as well as to invent better way of organizing information.
• Functional languages provide an appealing alternative to the traditional imperative and object-oriented programming paradigms. They allow us to easily solve difficult problems such as writing highly parallel and scalable applications as well as to solve difficult algorithmic problems.
• Dynamic languages. We provide support for Phalanger, which is a PHP language compiler for .NET. PHP is an example of dynamically typed language, which means that programmers don’t write types explicitly in their programs. This makes programming easier, but it also brings interesting challenges. For example, how can developer tools provide good IntelliSense support to the programmer when they don’t know the type of variables?