Lindsey Kuper

I want to wrap up 2024 by talking about my friend Alan Jeffrey, who we lost this year.

I’m pretty sure I met Alan at the first academic conference I ever attended, which was ICFP 2010, but he was a regular in that community for decades before that. Other people of course knew him far longer, and far better, than I did. Jeremy Gibbons’ lovely eulogy, which he gave at Alan’s Celebration of Life in November, highlights the incredible breadth and depth of Alan’s career and makes me wish I had another twenty years to talk shop with him. Robby Findler’s remembrance of Alan, which he shared at ICFP 2024 a few months after Alan passed away in July, also touched me deeply.

Robby and Jeremy represent a community for which Alan’s passing is a tremendous loss. But one thing that has really amazed me over the last year has been to see how many communities Alan was part of, and the incredible number and variety of lives he touched. When his health took a turn for the worse this spring, I exchanged emails and Signal messages about Alan with people who I know in completely different contexts – people who don’t know each other, but who had in common a connection to Alan, and who thought fondly of him. Academics; open source software folks; people considerably older or younger than me – he was part of all of their worlds.

While I was never fortunate enough to collaborate on research with Alan, a project we did do together was organizing captioning of all the ICFP 2020 and 2021 talks – the main thing we accomplished as accessibility co-chairs on the ICFP organizing committee in those years.1 Captions make conference talks better for everyone. They improve accessibility for Deaf and hard of hearing people (as well as people with a mild degree of hearing loss), non-native speakers of the language being used (a large fraction of the ICFP community), and folks with auditory processing issues or ADHD. Last but not least, they provide a useful searchable text record of talk content. Automatic speech-to-text tools aren’t good enough – although an automated tool might produce something useful to get started with, the task requires expert human attention.2

ICFP 2020 was unusual in that authors pre-recorded their talks. We got videos from authors, assembled them into sessions, and sent those off to a professional captioning vendor. Unfortunately, we picked an inferior captioning vendor, so the captions we were able to get were often wrong. Alan then personally went through a large number of the talks and made corrections in places where the professional captioner got a piece of jargon wrong, lacked context for what was going on, or didn’t understand a speaker’s accent. I corrected some of the talks myself as well, but Alan did many more of them. You need only look at a few of Alan’s commits to witness his painstaking attention to detail and vast domain expertise at work.

After our correction pass, we also organized a process by which the speakers themselves could submit corrections to their captions, which caught further issues that Alan and I missed. (An amazing volunteer, Matt McCutchen, then handled the process of chopping up the session videos into individual talk videos and syncing the corrected captions with each of those individual videos.) I’m happy to say that in the end, the 2020 captions were high quality.

At ICFP 2021, which again had pre-recorded talks, we changed our process and asked authors to provide their own captions for the regular talks, and I’m happy to say that 97% of them actually did! For the plenary events, such as keynote talks and awards presentations, as well as for the PLMW workshop, we had high-quality live captioning thanks to White Coat Captioning, a fantastic captioning vendor. A large part of the reason we were able to afford this high-quality live captioning, by the way, was because Alan was also serving as the industrial relations chair for the conference and was able to line up financial sponsorships.

Alan had brain cancer, and last fall, as his health began to fail, he began having trouble understanding spoken language, although reading wasn’t a problem. This would of course be terrifying for most of us. But Alan had a typically laid-back attitude about it and he mentioned that he himself could now unexpectedly benefit from the work he’d done a few years earlier on captions.

(Am I politicizing Alan’s illness and death right now to argue for better accessibility affordances at conferences, more empathy for our colleagues who need them, and less dependence on unreliable AI tools? You’re goddamn fucking right I am.)

In general, whatever life threw at Alan, whether it was serious health issues (he also had MS) or ill-conceived corporate layoffs (he was part of the amazing Servo team that Mozilla gave the boot to in 2020), he somehow always handled it with serenity and found the positive side of every situation.3 He seemed to enjoy every day he was alive. He posted frequent smiling selfies and was happy to have outlived Henry Kissinger. Robby said that Alan had not only “syntactic serenity” – the shallow kind that has become a meme – but “semantic serenity, a deep sense of joy and acceptance of whatever it was that was there in front of him” – and I can’t think of a more fitting way to describe Alan.

In 2025 and beyond, may we all remember Alan fondly and try to live up to his example.

  1. Alan was accessibility co-chair with me both years, but he wasn’t officially listed on the ICFP website as such, either year. It was just a role that he (thankfully) jumped into because we needed help with captioning stuff. He never cared about getting credit. (Another accessibility co-chair, Kathrin Stark, joined in 2021 and handled non-captioning-related aspects of accessibility, such as an accessibility audit of our website.) ↩

  2. Here’s just one example, from Zoe Paraskevopoulou’s presentation of her ICFP 2021 paper, “Compositional optimizations for CertiCoq”. About a minute into the talk, Zoe makes an important point: “not all optimizations are beneficial for all programs”. This is what you’ll see by default on YouTube if you have captions turned on. But if you choose “English - auto-generated” instead of “English - English captions”, the caption has almost the opposite meaning: “notable optimizations are beneficial for all programs”. There’s an even worse auto-captioning fail about thirty seconds later: Zoe says “compiler correctness theorem”, but the auto-generated caption says “compiler correctness error”! This is why you need human experts to be involved. ↩

  3. I don’t really want to link to Alan’s old Twitter account – he quit Twitter years ago anyway – but he responded to my anguished tweet about the Servo team getting laid off with a characteristically laid-back and cheerful, “Thanks. It’s been a wild ride!” Working at Mozilla was, and maybe still is, an identity for a lot of people, even those of us who were just the interns (hi). Alan was there for many years, but was wise enough to never let a job become his identity. That was just one of the myriad ways in which we could all stand to learn from him. ↩

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