Professor Laurence Tratt, King's College London

Professor Tratt aims to improve the performance of widely used programming languages such as Ruby and Python, whose mainstream implementations currently run much many times slower than state-of-the-art alternatives: however, these alternatives are not 100% compatible with the mainstream implementations, limiting their use. His research aims for the "best of both worlds" by automatically adding Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers to the mainstream implementations themselves: improving performance while retaining 100% compatibility.