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Hi! I'm Patrick Ferris, an open-source Software Engineer from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Currently I'm a research assistant in the Energy and Environment Group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Cambridge. This work primarily focuses on building trusted carbon credits and geospatial analysis infrastructure focusing on transparency, reproducibility and accessibility.

I also work with Tarides on open-source OCaml. This includes distributed systems with OCurrent, the new OCaml website and more recently on effects and direct-style, asynchronous IO. I also take part in Outreachy.

I'm particularly interested in how technology can help tackle climate change (checkout geocaml) and improve access to education. The moral and social implications of technology is also an area I'm passionate about.

Below are some posts and experiments relating to some of the work I've done or that I am working on. Experiments tend to be in the form of standalone repositories whereas posts are thoughts and ideas in a written, long-form format.

~ Experiments ~

  • Omditor

    Omditor is an experiment to provide offline-first, markdown document editing. The idea being to use Irmin's mergeable datatypes to provide a means of resynchronising a central store with completely independent copies of the store on different devices belonging to different people. The README of the project provides more detail about how it all works.

  • Northern Irish Forests

    The "Northern Irish Forests" experiment was done during COP26 as an opportunity to learn a bit more about the current situation of various habitats in Northern Ireland. Simultaneously it was a chance to try using a brr ppx along with a brr-flavoured lwd library for reactive programming in the browser using pure OCaml. A text-only version of the site is here.

See more...

~ Posts ~

~ Papers ~

  • Experiences with Effects (OCaml Workshop 2021 at ICFP)

    Thomas Leonard, Craig Ferguson, Patrick Ferris, Sadiq Jaffer, Tom Kelly, KC Sivaramakrishnan, Anil Madhavapeddy

    PDF

  • Identification of Patient Prescribing Predicting Cancer Diagnosis Using Boosted Decision Trees

    Josephine French, Cong Chen, Katherine Henson, Brian Shand, Patrick Ferris, Josh Pencheon, Sally Vernon, Meena Rafiq, David Howe, Georgios Lyratzopoulos, Jem Rashbass

    Springer