Philipp Haller

Philipp Haller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, affiliated with the Theoretical Computer Science Group, Digital Futures, and WASP. He holds a PhD from EPFL (2010) and has held research positions at Stanford and EPFL, and industry roles at Typesafe Inc.

Research Interests: His work centers on programming language design, concurrency (especially actor and futures models), distributed programming, type systems, and serverless computing. He is a leading contributor to the Scala language, having co-created its async/await syntax and futures library. His recent research includes the Portals framework for stateful serverless applications and formal models for consistency and concurrency safety.

Publication Trends: His recent work (2020–2024) shows a strong focus on safe and scalable concurrency, stateful serverless systems, formal verification of language features, and distributed data consistency. He frequently publishes in top venues like ECOOP, OOPSLA, and PLDI, often combining theory with practical implementations in Scala.

• 2019 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award (for Scala)
• 2017 Teacher of the Year, EECS, KTH

Advising and Grants: He supervises PhD students including Jonas Spenger, Xin Zhao, and Viktor Palmkvist. He led the Software Development Academy, a reskilling program for immigrants funded by the Wallenberg Foundations. He actively participates in academic service, co-chairing workshops like PLACES and AGERE!, and serving on program committees for OOPSLA, ECOOP, and POPL.

Labs and Teams: He is part of the Theoretical Computer Science Group at KTH and leads research related to the Portals framework, which unifies dataflow and actor models for edge and serverless computing.