Rod M. Burstall’s research while affiliated with University of Edinburgh and other places

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Publications (41)


A System which Automatically Improves Programs
  • Article
  • Full-text available

March 1976

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89 Reads

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184 Citations

Acta Informatica

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R. M. Burstall

Here we give methods of mechanically converting programs that are easy to understand into more efficient ones, converting recursion equations using high level operations into lower level flowchart programs. The main transformations involved are (i) recursion removal (ii) eliminating common subexpressions and combining loops (iii) replacing procedure calls by their bodies (iv) introducing assignments which overwrite list cells no longer in use (compiletime garbage collection).

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A versatile computer-controlled assembly system

June 1975

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36 Reads

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185 Citations

Artificial Intelligence

A.P. Ambler

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C.M. Brown

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R.J. Popplestone

A versatile assembly system, using TV cameras and computer-controlled arm and moving table, is described. It makes simple assemblies such as a peg and rings and a toy car. It separates parts from a heap, recognizing them with an overhead camera, then assembles them by feel. It can be instructed to perform a new task with different parts by spending an hour or two showing it the parts and a day programming the assembly manipulations. A hierarchical description of parts, views, outlines, etc. is used to construct models, and a structure matching algorithm is used in recognition.


Some transformations for developing recursive programs

June 1975

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21 Reads

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95 Citations

ACM SIGPLAN Notices

The paper describes a system of rules for transforming programs, the programs being in the form of recursion equations. The idea is to start with a very simple, lucid and hopefully correct program, then to transform it into a more efficient one by altering the recursion structure. Illustrative examples of program transformations are given, and a tentative implementation is described. We hope to throw some light on the alternative structures for programs, also to indicate a possible initial phase for an automatic or semi-automatic program manipulation system.


TABLE 3 
A Versatile Computer-Controlled Assembly System.

January 1973

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158 Reads

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102 Citations

A versatile assembly system, using TV cameras and oomputer-controlled arm and moving table, is described. It makes almple assemblies such aa a peg and rings and a toy car. It separates parts from a heap, recognising them with an overhead camera, then assembles them by feel. It can be instructed to perform a new task with different parte by spending an hour showing it the parts and a day or two programming the assembly manipulations. A hierarchical description of parts, views, outlines etc. is used to construct models, and a structure matching algorithm is used in recognition.


SOME TECHNIQUES FOR RECOGNISING STRUCTURES IN PICTURES

December 1972

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12 Reads

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83 Citations

This chapter discusses some techniques for recognizing structures in pictures. The research aims to develop techniques whereby a machine may observe its surroundings and then use its observations to achieve goals in an effective and efficient manner. To fulfill such requirements, the machine will inevitably use knowledge gained from past experience and observation to plan its activities, and also to interpret its sensory data. The chapter discusses the idea of a finite relational structure, that is, a set of elements with given properties and relations among them, as a useful mathematical tool for describing pictures, and to describe general techniques for matching such structures against each other. The matching process for relational structures attempts to find whether one structure occurs in or is a substructure of another structure. More precisely one need a function that assigns to each element of the first structure a distinct element of the second structure in such a way as to preserve the properties and relations which subsist in the first structure.






Citations (36)


... We should mention as the sources of the descriptive view on image analysis and consequently of DA the works of 1970 -1990 by F. Ambler, G. Barrow, R. Burstall [1], T. ...

Reference:

ICPRAI 2018 SI: Descriptive Image Analysis. Foundations and Descriptive Image Algebras
SOME TECHNIQUES FOR RECOGNISING STRUCTURES IN PICTURES
  • Citing Chapter
  • December 1972

... The mechanism for referring to non-local variables which is built into the BCPL language is inadequate to deal naturally with this situation. (So, for that matter, are those in ALGOL 60, ALGOL 68 and PL/1; two languages which are sufficiently powerful are PAL (Evans, 1968) and POP-2 (Burstall, Collins, and Popplestone, 1968).) This means that we must make special provisions to preserve the information ourselves, which we do by keeping it all in the vector S. The length of S may therefore vary from stream to stream, but the first few elements are always reserved for the basic functions and routines. ...

POP-2 Papers
  • Citing Article
  • February 1970

The Mathematical Gazette

... The preceding section described an example of arity-generic programming. We consider now a type-generic task: proving the no confusion property [4] of datatype constructors (that is, they are injective and disjoint) for a closed universe of strictly positive types. For defining a universe of datatypes, the idea (describe in more detail by Dagand and McBride [9]) is to define a type whose elements are interpreted as codes for datatype signatures and combine this with a type-level least fixedpoint operator. ...

Algebras, Theories and Freeness: An Introduction for Computer Scientists
  • Citing Article
  • January 1982

... The Poplog system developed at Sussex University in the early 1980s was an implementation of the Pop-11 language (a descendant of Pop-2 [Burstall and Popplestone 1968]) that included support for Prolog (hence the name). Subsequently, support for Common Lisp and later Standard ML was added to the implementation; the SML implementation was owed to Robert Duncan and Simon Nichols and corresponded roughly to the 1990 version of the language. ...

POP-2: Reference menual
  • Citing Article
  • January 1968

... Following this general approach, the first part of the paper develops the notion of derived structures and models. Burstall and Goguen [20,48] introduced the notion of derivor 4 to 4 Implemented as part of the mechanisms available in the programming language Clear [20] to synthesize operations out from a set of basic (and available) ones [47,48]. ...

Some fundamental algebraic tools for the semantics of computation : Part 2: Signed and abstract theories
  • Citing Article
  • December 1984

Theoretical Computer Science

... The graph correspondence problem between G a and G t then reduces to finding the maximum clique of the correspondence graph C [2]. This allows us to obtain matches between the 2D tree positions of the aerial and terrestrial clouds, used to solve for the relative planar pose using Umeyama's method [27]. ...

Subgraph isomorphism, matching relational structures and maximal cliques
  • Citing Article
  • January 1976

Information Processing Letters

... Freddy II was a "hand-eye" robot that could assemble toy wooden models from a heap of pieces. It used vision to identify and locate the parts, and was able to rearrange them to enable identification when they were obscured by other parts [1]. Given the state-of-the-art at the time, this required not only building the robot, but also designing and building the vision system, and a programming environment for controlling the various subsystems. ...

A versatile computer-controlled assembly system
  • Citing Article
  • June 1975

Artificial Intelligence

... • Mathematical induction • Equational logic • CASL [326] • OBJ [327] • Clear [328] • Larch [329] • ACT-ONE [330] • LOTOS [331] Declarative modeling Logic-based languages, functional languages, rewriting languages, and languages for defining formal semantics. ...

An informal introduction to specifications using clear
  • Citing Article
  • January 1980