When is causal broadcast not enough for causal memory?
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distributed computing
A CAP tradeoff in the wild
There’s a classic tradeoff between safety and liveness in the context of replicated data systems, originally proposed by Eric Brewer and later made precise b...
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
Who invented vector clocks?
Back in spring 2020, I was wrapping up the distributed systems course I was teaching, and for the last lecture, decided to spend a little time poking at the ...
Course announcement: Distributed Software Systems: Global-First and Local-First Perspectives
This winter, I once again have the chance to offer a graduate seminar course on any topic I want. (Yay!) A couple months ago, I brainstormed a list of topi...
My FLOPS 2022 keynote talk: “Adventures in Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Liquid Haskell”
Back in May, I gave the opening keynote (my first keynote talk!) at the FLOPS 2022 conference. I talked about the work we’ve been doing in my group on using...
CAREER: Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Refinement Types
Friends, I’m very happy to announce that I received an NSF CAREER Award to support my research at the intersection of distributed systems, programming langua...
CSE138 returns to Twitch today!
TL;DR: Starting today, March 30, 2021, I’m live-streaming my undergraduate distributed systems course on Twitch every Tuesday and Thursday for the next ten w...
Twitch plays CSE138
For obvious reasons, this quarter I’m teaching my undergrad distributed systems course, CSE138, to over 100 students remotely instead of in person.
My students made zines, and so can you(rs)!
This spring, I taught our undergrad distributed systems course here at UC Santa Cruz for the first time! It was a blast, and one of the most fun things abou...
How I learned about Merklix trees (without having to become a cryptocurrency enthusiast)
In my distributed systems course a couple weeks ago, we were discussing how the anti-entropy mechanism in the Dynamo key-value store uses Merkle trees to eff...
An example run of the Chandy-Lamport snapshot algorithm
In the undergrad distributed systems course I’m teaching this spring, I decided I wanted to discuss the Chandy-Lamport algorithm for snapshotting the global ...
“Toward Domain-Specific Solvers for Distributed Consistency” will appear at SNAPL 2019
This year at SNAPL, I’ll be presenting a new paper, co-authored with my colleague Peter Alvaro, that collects our recent thinking on consistency-aware solver...
Jane Street Tech Talk: “Abstractions for Expressive, Efficient Parallel and Distributed Computing”
In January, I visited New York to give a talk at Jane Street on “Abstractions for Expressive, Efficient Parallel and Distributed Computing” as part of their ...
Course retrospective: Languages and Abstractions for Distributed Programming
My first term here at UC Santa Cruz has wrapped up, and with it, my graduate seminar course, Languages and Abstractions for Distributed Programming. I had a...
An introduction to replica conflict resolution
A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to do a guest lecture in my colleague Peter Alvaro’s undergrad distributed systems course! Peter is well-known as an...
Course announcement: Languages and Abstractions for Distributed Programming
Hi, friends! This fall will be my first quarter teaching at UC Santa Cruz! I’m very excited to announce that this fall I’m teaching a graduate seminar on o...
Call for submissions: PaPoC 2018
I’m serving on the program committee for the 2018 Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, co-located with EuroSys ‘18 in Por...
Notes on Halide and Distributed Halide
Halide is a newish domain-specific language for writing high-performance image processing pipelines, originally created by a group of researchers at MIT and ...
The saga of Accumulo bug 4379
Not too long ago, I was setting up an installation of the Accumulo distributed database. At some point in the process, I ran Accumulo’s bin/bootstrap_config...
What even is OpenStack?
A few days ago, I needed to learn what OpenStack is. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
I finally finished my dissertation!
My misspent youth.
What’s the difference between LVars and CRDTs?
Greetings from Κεφαλονιά!
A few notes from PaPoC 2015
I spent last week in beautiful Bordeaux, France, attending EuroSys 2015 and the affiliated PaPoC workshop. This was my first EuroSys, as well as my first no...
What isn’t a key-value store?
So there’s this website called DB-Engines that ranks database systems according to their popularity. (They determine popularity based on various factors, in...
Call for submissions: PaPoC 2015
I’m excited to be serving on the program committee for this year’s Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC). The work...
My thesis defense talk
A few weeks ago, I defended my dissertation!
Dissertation draft readers wanted!
Inspired by Brent Yorgey, I’m finally going public with a draft of my dissertation!
Draft: “Deterministic Threshold Queries of Distributed Data Structures”
I’m happy to announce a draft paper on my work (in collaboration with my advisor, Ryan Newton) on bringing LVar-style threshold reads to the setting of C(v)R...
Two LVars papers at WoDet
In a couple of days, I’m headed to the WoDet workshop, which is co-located with ASPLOS in Salt Lake City this year. WoDet is a workshop devoted to determini...
Disorder and determinism
My research on LVars is all about deterministic parallel programming: writing programs so that they can be scheduled onto parallel hardware with the goal of ...
New paper draft: “Joining Forces”
I’m happy to announce a new draft paper, “Joining Forces: Toward a Unified Account of LVars and Convergent Replicated Data Types”, that my advisor and I just...
My thesis proposal, and my second Hacker School residency
I’ve just posted a draft of my thesis proposal, which, barring disaster, I’ll be presenting to my research committee next Friday. To spill the beans, here’s...
Thoughts on CRDTs and threshold reads
Update (November 30, 2013): I updated this post to reflect some of my current thinking on threshold reads for CRDTs and why I think high-water-mark reads are...
What’s the deal with LVars and CRDTs?
Earlier this week, I gave a talk on LVars at RICON West, a distributed systems industry conference. It covered a lot of the same material as my talk at FHPC...
parallelism
Jane Street Tech Talk: “Abstractions for Expressive, Efficient Parallel and Distributed Computing”
In January, I visited New York to give a talk at Jane Street on “Abstractions for Expressive, Efficient Parallel and Distributed Computing” as part of their ...
“Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL” will appear at ECOOP 2017
I’m very happy to announce that “Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL”, by Todd Anderson, Paul Liu, Ehsan Totoni, Jan Vitek, Tatiana Shpeisman, and me...
“An introduction to ParallelAccelerator.jl” on the Julia blog
This month, I have a guest post, “An introduction to ParallelAccelerator.jl”, appearing on the Julia blog!
My talk on Prospect and ParallelAccelerator.jl at SPLASH-I 2015
I just got back from SPLASH 2015, held in beautiful and topologically interesting Pittsburgh!1 While there, I gave a talk in the SPLASH-I track, and thanks ...
I finally finished my dissertation!
My misspent youth.
I’m speaking at SPLASH 2015
I’m going to be on stage a couple of times at the SPLASH conference this October in Pittsburgh. If you’ll be there, please say hello!
What’s the difference between LVars and CRDTs?
Greetings from Κεφαλονιά!
Yet another blog post about how parallelism is not concurrency
Recently, an acquaintance asked for an explanation of the difference between parallelism and concurrency. Blog posts about how parallelism is not concurrenc...
My thesis defense talk
A few weeks ago, I defended my dissertation!
Dissertation draft readers wanted!
Inspired by Brent Yorgey, I’m finally going public with a draft of my dissertation!
Draft: “Deterministic Threshold Queries of Distributed Data Structures”
I’m happy to announce a draft paper on my work (in collaboration with my advisor, Ryan Newton) on bringing LVar-style threshold reads to the setting of C(v)R...
A one-minute talk about “Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo”
At PLDI a few weeks ago, my advisor Ryan Newton presented our paper “Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo: Extensible Deterministic Parallelism with LVish”. This ...
The LVar that was, after all
Last year, I wrote a post about a so-called LVar data structure that, upon closer inspection, turned out not to be an LVar at all. In that post, I proposed ...
“Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo” and the PLDI artifact evaluation process
My co-authors Aaron Todd, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Ryan Newton, and I have just finished up the camera-ready version of our new paper, “Taming the Parallel Effec...
Two LVars papers at WoDet
In a couple of days, I’m headed to the WoDet workshop, which is co-located with ASPLOS in Salt Lake City this year. WoDet is a workshop devoted to determini...
Disorder and determinism
My research on LVars is all about deterministic parallel programming: writing programs so that they can be scheduled onto parallel hardware with the goal of ...
How to freeze after writing
Last week at POPL, I presented “Freeze After Writing: Quasi-Deterministic Parallel Programming with LVars”. In this paper, my co-authors Aaron Turon, Neel ...
New paper draft: “Joining Forces”
I’m happy to announce a new draft paper, “Joining Forces: Toward a Unified Account of LVars and Convergent Replicated Data Types”, that my advisor and I just...
The LVar that wasn’t
Suppose we want to write a program in which two threads, say, t1 and t2, each contribute a Boolean value, either True or False, to a shared result. If both ...
My thesis proposal, and my second Hacker School residency
I’ve just posted a draft of my thesis proposal, which, barring disaster, I’ll be presenting to my research committee next Friday. To spill the beans, here’s...
What’s the deal with LVars and CRDTs?
Earlier this week, I gave a talk on LVars at RICON West, a distributed systems industry conference. It covered a lot of the same material as my talk at FHPC...
“Freeze After Writing” will appear at POPL 2014
My co-authors Aaron Turon, Neel Krishnaswami, Ryan Newton, and I are very happy to announce that our paper “Freeze After Writing: Quasi-Deterministic Paralle...
Some example MVar, IVar, and LVar programs in Haskell
In the writing and speaking I’ve done about LVars, I’ve done my best to show a lot of example code. For the most part, though, the examples have been writte...
Two LVars papers
Greetings from surprisingly sunny Portland, Oregon: [“LVars: Lattice-based Data Structures for Deterministic Parallelism”]: [FHPC ‘13]: http://hiperfit.dk/...
How to read from an LVar: an illustrated guide
I’ve written a few posts about my work on LVars, which are data structures that support deterministic multithreaded computation. Fundamentally, there are tw...
Writing macros that write Redex
Over the last year or two, I’ve been using PLT Redex more and more often as a tool for my research. Redex is a domain-specific programming language and suit...
A new paper draft, and a debugging story
I’m excited to announce a new paper draft, “LVars: Deterministic Parallelism through Shared Monotonic Data Structures”, that my advisor Ryan and I just submi...
Determinism abides
On a trip to Europe last month, I was scheduled to give three talks about my research on deterministic parallelism. The talks all had the same topic, but wi...
I can’t believe I was allowed to say “relationships between ordered sets”
A few days ago, my friend and colleague Tim did the describe-what-you-do-using-only-the-ten-hundred-words-people-use-the-most-often thing. I’d tried to do i...
A ten-minute talk about my research
I just had a talk proposal accepted to the student short talk session at POPL, which will be in Rome next week. They’re not messing around when they say “sh...
LVars
I finally finished my dissertation!
My misspent youth.
What’s the difference between inflationary and monotonic functions?
Every now and then, I cave in and look at the Reddit comments on my blog posts. Recently, someone wanted to know the difference between “inflationary” and “...
How to learn to do determinism proofs
A couple days ago, my advisor asked me what reading material I would suggest to a new student who wants to learn to do determinism proofs like the ones we di...
What’s the difference between LVars and CRDTs?
Greetings from Κεφαλονιά!
My thesis defense talk
A few weeks ago, I defended my dissertation!
Frame problems and frame properties
One of the ideas that has been important to me as I’ve worked on LVars is the notion of a frame property. A frame property captures the idea of local reason...
Dissertation draft readers wanted!
Inspired by Brent Yorgey, I’m finally going public with a draft of my dissertation!
Draft: “Deterministic Threshold Queries of Distributed Data Structures”
I’m happy to announce a draft paper on my work (in collaboration with my advisor, Ryan Newton) on bringing LVar-style threshold reads to the setting of C(v)R...
A one-minute talk about “Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo”
At PLDI a few weeks ago, my advisor Ryan Newton presented our paper “Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo: Extensible Deterministic Parallelism with LVish”. This ...
The LVar that was, after all
Last year, I wrote a post about a so-called LVar data structure that, upon closer inspection, turned out not to be an LVar at all. In that post, I proposed ...
“Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo” and the PLDI artifact evaluation process
My co-authors Aaron Todd, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Ryan Newton, and I have just finished up the camera-ready version of our new paper, “Taming the Parallel Effec...
Two LVars papers at WoDet
In a couple of days, I’m headed to the WoDet workshop, which is co-located with ASPLOS in Salt Lake City this year. WoDet is a workshop devoted to determini...
Disorder and determinism
My research on LVars is all about deterministic parallel programming: writing programs so that they can be scheduled onto parallel hardware with the goal of ...
How to freeze after writing
Last week at POPL, I presented “Freeze After Writing: Quasi-Deterministic Parallel Programming with LVars”. In this paper, my co-authors Aaron Turon, Neel ...
New paper draft: “Joining Forces”
I’m happy to announce a new draft paper, “Joining Forces: Toward a Unified Account of LVars and Convergent Replicated Data Types”, that my advisor and I just...
The LVar that wasn’t
Suppose we want to write a program in which two threads, say, t1 and t2, each contribute a Boolean value, either True or False, to a shared result. If both ...
My thesis proposal, and my second Hacker School residency
I’ve just posted a draft of my thesis proposal, which, barring disaster, I’ll be presenting to my research committee next Friday. To spill the beans, here’s...
Thoughts on CRDTs and threshold reads
Update (November 30, 2013): I updated this post to reflect some of my current thinking on threshold reads for CRDTs and why I think high-water-mark reads are...
What’s the deal with LVars and CRDTs?
Earlier this week, I gave a talk on LVars at RICON West, a distributed systems industry conference. It covered a lot of the same material as my talk at FHPC...
“Freeze After Writing” will appear at POPL 2014
My co-authors Aaron Turon, Neel Krishnaswami, Ryan Newton, and I are very happy to announce that our paper “Freeze After Writing: Quasi-Deterministic Paralle...
Some example MVar, IVar, and LVar programs in Haskell
In the writing and speaking I’ve done about LVars, I’ve done my best to show a lot of example code. For the most part, though, the examples have been writte...
Interpreting LVar effects as resources
Lately I’ve been thinking about an analogy between properties that are and aren’t true of LVar operations, and presence or lack of structural rules in a logi...
Two LVars papers
Greetings from surprisingly sunny Portland, Oregon: [“LVars: Lattice-based Data Structures for Deterministic Parallelism”]: [FHPC ‘13]: http://hiperfit.dk/...
How to read from an LVar: an illustrated guide
I’ve written a few posts about my work on LVars, which are data structures that support deterministic multithreaded computation. Fundamentally, there are tw...
Writing macros that write Redex
Over the last year or two, I’ve been using PLT Redex more and more often as a tool for my research. Redex is a domain-specific programming language and suit...
A new paper draft, and a debugging story
I’m excited to announce a new paper draft, “LVars: Deterministic Parallelism through Shared Monotonic Data Structures”, that my advisor Ryan and I just submi...
Determinism abides
On a trip to Europe last month, I was scheduled to give three talks about my research on deterministic parallelism. The talks all had the same topic, but wi...
I can’t believe I was allowed to say “relationships between ordered sets”
A few days ago, my friend and colleague Tim did the describe-what-you-do-using-only-the-ten-hundred-words-people-use-the-most-often thing. I’d tried to do i...
A ten-minute talk about my research
I just had a talk proposal accepted to the student short talk session at POPL, which will be in Rome next week. They’re not messing around when they say “sh...
CFP
Call for talk proposals: !!Con West 2020!
!!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”) West is a radically eclectic, radically affordable conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise ...
Call for talk proposals: !!Con West 2019!
Her name is Octothorpe.
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2018
This year, I’m again serving as a co-chair of the Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop, together with my friend Sam Tobin-Hochstadt. ...
The call for papers formerly known as ICFP
2018 will be my third and final year serving as the publicity chair for ICFP, the International Conference on Functional Programming. So, not too long ago, ...
Call for submissions: PaPoC 2018
I’m serving on the program committee for the 2018 Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, co-located with EuroSys ‘18 in Por...
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2017
This year, Eric Walkingshaw and I are serving as co-chairs of DSLDI, the Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop, co-located with SPLASH ...
Call for talk proposals: !!Con 2017
!!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”) is a conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing. I co-founded !!Con with a group...
The fine print in the ICFP 2017 call for papers
This year, I’m excited to be serving on the program committee for ICFP, the annual academic conference on the theory and practice of functional programming. ...
Call for talk proposals: OBT 2017
It’s time once again to sound the call for talk proposals for the Off the Beaten Track workshop, the next edition of which will be co-located with POPL 2017 ...
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2016
I’m serving on the program committee for this year’s Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop (DSLDI). The workshop will be co-located wi...
Call for talk proposals: !!Con 2016
For the third year in a row, some good friends and I are organizing !!Con (pronounced bang bang con), a conference consisting entirely of ten-minute talks ab...
Two announcements about OBT: invited speakers and funding for speaker expenses
The submission deadline for Off the Beaten Track is coming up in a bit over a week! I’m looking forward to seeing your talk proposals. In the meantime, I h...
Call for submissions: Off the Beaten Track 2016
It’s that time again. The call for talk submissions for Off the Beaten Track 2016 is open, and this year I have the honor of serving as the program chair!
Call for papers: IFL 2015
Once again this year, I’m serving on the program committee for IFL, the annual Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages, and the c...
Call for proposals: !!Con 2015
This year, for the second year in a row, my friends and I are organizing !!Con (pronounced bang bang con), a conference about the joy, excitement, and surpri...
Call for papers: Onward! 2015
The Onward! 2015 conference has opened their call for papers, and I’m very excited to be serving on the program committee this year!
One last CFP to wrap up the year: Tiny ToCS
Tiny Transactions on Computer Science, the premier venue for computer science research of 140 characters or less, is seeking submissions for its third volume...
Call for submissions: PaPoC 2015
I’m excited to be serving on the program committee for this year’s Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC). The work...
Call for submissions: Off the Beaten Track 2015
The call for submissions for Off the Beaten Track 2015 is open, and I’m very excited and proud to be serving on the program committee this year!
Call for papers: IFL 2014
This year, I’m on the program committee for IFL, the annual Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages. It’ll be held at Northeaste...
Call for submissions: 2014 Haskell Symposium
The call for submissions is open for this year’s Haskell Symposium. It will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden this September, and will be co-located, as is trad...
bangbangcon
Join us for !!Con, and help spread the word!
The short version of this post: The last-ever !!Con is coming up in a month from today! Please spread the word about !!Con and get your tickets here!
The last !!Con!
You may or may not already know about !!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”), the radically eclectic, radically affordable conference of ten-minute talks about t...
!!Con 2021 starts today!
!!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”) is a radically eclectic, radically affordable conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise of co...
Call for talk proposals: !!Con West 2020!
!!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”) West is a radically eclectic, radically affordable conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise ...
Call for talk proposals: !!Con West 2019!
Her name is Octothorpe.
Back to school
Friends, I have some big news!
Four kinds of talk proposals that get rejected from !!Con
It’s that time of year again: I’m working on organizing !!Con (“bang bang con”), the conference of lightning talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise of...
How to write a timeline for a !!Con talk proposal
Every spring, I help review talk proposals for !!Con, a conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement and surprise of computing. Because distilli...
Scaling !!Con
As regular readers of this blog are probably tired of hearing by now, !!Con (“bang bang con”) is a weekend-long conference of ten-minute talks about experien...
Call for talk proposals: !!Con 2017
!!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”) is a conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing. I co-founded !!Con with a group...
‘Experiencing computing viscerally’: my PG Podcast interview about !!Con
A few days ago, I had the fun experience of being interviewed by Philip Guo for his excellent new podcast series. Phil invites his interview subjects to dis...
Help the !!Con 2016 attendees eat breakfast
Update (May 5, 2016): Thanks to everyone who’s offered to chip in and help !!Con out financially! There’s now an easy way to do so as an individual: bangban...
Call for talk proposals: !!Con 2016
For the third year in a row, some good friends and I are organizing !!Con (pronounced bang bang con), a conference consisting entirely of ten-minute talks ab...
Captioning videos: a fun and easy way to contribute to !!Con right now
For the last two years, I’ve helped put on !!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”), the radically inclusive conference about the joy, excitement, and surprise of ...
Call for proposals: !!Con 2015
This year, for the second year in a row, my friends and I are organizing !!Con (pronounced bang bang con), a conference about the joy, excitement, and surpri...
Your next conference should have real-time captioning
I was one of the organizers of !!Con, a free conference about the joy, excitement and surprise of programming that happened two weeks ago in New York.
academia
Join us at the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop at ICFP next month
The Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop is a fun and free event for people who want to learn about careers in programming languages (PL) research. The...
How not to email prospective grad school advisors
It’s grad school application season1, which means that prospective students have been emailing potential faculty advisors. In my field, computer science, th...
Yet another post telling you to apply to PLMW
Along with Nate Foster and Talia Ringer, I’m organizing the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop, or PLMW, in conjunction with the International Conferen...
Apply to PLMW
The Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop, or PLMW, is a one-day event that’s held on the day before the main conference program starts at the four major ...
My first year as a professor
On July 1, I celebrated my first anniversary of employment as an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz! As my second year gets under way, now seems like a go...
You don’t need a 4.0 to go to grad school
Recently on Twitter, Justine Sherry pointed out (in response to hearing about a student afraid to minor in art because they thought it would hurt their appli...
Where and when should you go to PLMW?
Here’s an anonymized question sent to me by a blog reader:
Back to school
Friends, I have some big news!
Upsides and downsides of “women in…” lists
A couple months ago, Jean Yang started a crowdsourced list of women doing programming languages and software engineering research. I added my name and adver...
Should you do an MS before doing a Ph.D.?
On the Recurse Center’s Zulip community, someone posted this request for advice recently:
Publicity chair tip: use ruby-gmail to send bulk emails via Gmail
I’m currently serving a three-year term as the publicity chair for ICFP. Like many conferences, we use a Gmail account for sending publicity emails. If you...
Getting into a Ph.D. program without previous research experience
Several weeks ago, I got this email from a reader of my blog:
That time my tweet got cited in a scientific journal
I use Twitter a lot. A couple years ago, I was walking through the woods near my building on campus in Indiana when I saw a gorgeous, shiny green critter th...
Don’t “invite” people to your program committee; ask them to serve
Recently, a friend told me that one of their pet peeves was being “invited” to do things like review papers on a program committee, rather than being asked t...
Why review papers?
A few days ago, in response to my complaining about all the reviewing I’ve had to do lately, an undergrad researcher friend asked me, “what’s the incentive t...
Things you can do to get ready for PL grad school
I recently got an email from someone who was about to graduate with an undergrad CS degree and was interested in pursuing programming languages research. Th...
Haskell
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
My FLOPS 2022 keynote talk: “Adventures in Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Liquid Haskell”
Back in May, I gave the opening keynote (my first keynote talk!) at the FLOPS 2022 conference. I talked about the work we’ve been doing in my group on using...
CAREER: Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Refinement Types
Friends, I’m very happy to announce that I received an NSF CAREER Award to support my research at the intersection of distributed systems, programming langua...
Two papers at HATRA
Today my students Gan Shen and Patrick Redmond and I are (virtually) attending the HATRA workshop co-located with SPLASH. HATRA is a relatively new workshop...
A simple but difficult arithmetic puzzle, and the rabbit hole it took me down
A while back, Mark Dominus proposed an arithmetic puzzle: combine the numbers 6, 6, 5, and 2 with arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplicatio...
Do ‘all Java type checkers have bugs’?
Update (February 2017): I’ve written a follow-up to this post!
Call for submissions: 2014 Haskell Symposium
The call for submissions is open for this year’s Haskell Symposium. It will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden this September, and will be co-located, as is trad...
How to freeze after writing
Last week at POPL, I presented “Freeze After Writing: Quasi-Deterministic Parallel Programming with LVars”. In this paper, my co-authors Aaron Turon, Neel ...
The LVar that wasn’t
Suppose we want to write a program in which two threads, say, t1 and t2, each contribute a Boolean value, either True or False, to a shared result. If both ...
“Freeze After Writing” will appear at POPL 2014
My co-authors Aaron Turon, Neel Krishnaswami, Ryan Newton, and I are very happy to announce that our paper “Freeze After Writing: Quasi-Deterministic Paralle...
Some example MVar, IVar, and LVar programs in Haskell
In the writing and speaking I’ve done about LVars, I’ve done my best to show a lot of example code. For the most part, though, the examples have been writte...
Write an interpreter: variables
This post is the second in a series. Last time, we started coding up a toy interpreter for a language of arithmetic expressions. This time, we’ll extend th...
Write an interpreter
I spent last week volunteering as a resident at Hacker School, where I helped a number of students write small interpreters. For the most part, the students...
A new paper draft, and a debugging story
I’m excited to announce a new paper draft, “LVars: Deterministic Parallelism through Shared Monotonic Data Structures”, that my advisor Ryan and I just submi...
personal
The last !!Con!
You may or may not already know about !!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”), the radically eclectic, radically affordable conference of ten-minute talks about t...
My first year as a professor
On July 1, I celebrated my first anniversary of employment as an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz! As my second year gets under way, now seems like a go...
Back to school
Friends, I have some big news!
Celebrating five years of this blog, and a change of pace
I started this blog five years ago, in January 2013. At the time, I lived in Bloomington, Indiana and was in the middle of my fifth year of grad school. I ...
Three times the Internet Archive helped me this year
Recently I remarked on Twitter, “I should donate to archive.org more. They’re how I know that large parts of my own past actually happened.” By “archive.or...
Participating in ICFP remotely
This year’s International Conference on Functional Programming, or ICFP ‘17 to its friends, will be getting under way in Oxford, UK in just a couple of days....
My first fifteen compilers
Update (July 2019): A revised version of this post now appears on PL Perspectives, the SIGPLAN blog.
Getting into a Ph.D. program without previous research experience
Several weeks ago, I got this email from a reader of my blog:
s/S/C/
It’s been nearly half a year since it happened, so it’s probably about time I mentioned it: the group I originally joined at Intel Labs, the Programming Syst...
A month of daily check-ins
Some time ago, in response to my asking what I should write about on this blog, Sumana suggested I write about what my typical day is like. I demurred, sayi...
Say “experts” instead of “smart people”
In his keynote talk at the PaPoC workshop at EuroSys last week, Peter Bourgon described a ha-ha-only-serious metric for whether an idea could be trusted for ...
What I do all day, as told to a first-year CS student
A few weeks ago, I had the fun and thought-provoking experience of being interviewed about my career by a first-year college student. Conducting an intervie...
Rejections
Update (June 14, 2017): Updated with rejections from 2016!
Music as preparation for a computer science career
Today on Twitter, an informal survey is making the rounds on the experiences of software developers who came to the field from “non-traditional”, that is, no...
talks
My FLOPS 2022 keynote talk: “Adventures in Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Liquid Haskell”
Back in May, I gave the opening keynote (my first keynote talk!) at the FLOPS 2022 conference. I talked about the work we’ve been doing in my group on using...
Jane Street Tech Talk: “Abstractions for Expressive, Efficient Parallel and Distributed Computing”
In January, I visited New York to give a talk at Jane Street on “Abstractions for Expressive, Efficient Parallel and Distributed Computing” as part of their ...
The first ten minutes of my JuliaCon talk
Last week, I presented a talk at JuliaCon 2016 about ParallelAccelerator.jl. Thanks to everyone at JuliaCon for being a great audience for this talk!
My talk on Prospect and ParallelAccelerator.jl at SPLASH-I 2015
I just got back from SPLASH 2015, held in beautiful and topologically interesting Pittsburgh!1 While there, I gave a talk in the SPLASH-I track, and thanks ...
I’m speaking at SPLASH 2015
I’m going to be on stage a couple of times at the SPLASH conference this October in Pittsburgh. If you’ll be there, please say hello!
What’s the difference between LVars and CRDTs?
Greetings from Κεφαλονιά!
My thesis defense talk
A few weeks ago, I defended my dissertation!
A one-minute talk about “Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo”
At PLDI a few weeks ago, my advisor Ryan Newton presented our paper “Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo: Extensible Deterministic Parallelism with LVish”. This ...
How to freeze after writing
Last week at POPL, I presented “Freeze After Writing: Quasi-Deterministic Parallel Programming with LVars”. In this paper, my co-authors Aaron Turon, Neel ...
What’s the deal with LVars and CRDTs?
Earlier this week, I gave a talk on LVars at RICON West, a distributed systems industry conference. It covered a lot of the same material as my talk at FHPC...
Determinism abides
On a trip to Europe last month, I was scheduled to give three talks about my research on deterministic parallelism. The talks all had the same topic, but wi...
SMT
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
My FLOPS 2022 keynote talk: “Adventures in Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Liquid Haskell”
Back in May, I gave the opening keynote (my first keynote talk!) at the FLOPS 2022 conference. I talked about the work we’ve been doing in my group on using...
Two papers at HATRA
Today my students Gan Shen and Patrick Redmond and I are (virtually) attending the HATRA workshop co-located with SPLASH. HATRA is a relatively new workshop...
Course retrospective: SMT Solving and Solver-Aided Systems
Last fall, at the start of my second year at UC Santa Cruz, I taught a graduate seminar on SMT solving and solver-aided systems!
Course announcement: SMT Solving and Solver-Aided Systems
This fall, I’m teaching a graduate seminar on a topic I’m very excited about: the design and implementation of SMT solvers, solver-aided languages, and solve...
“Toward Domain-Specific Solvers for Distributed Consistency” will appear at SNAPL 2019
This year at SNAPL, I’ll be presenting a new paper, co-authored with my colleague Peter Alvaro, that collects our recent thinking on consistency-aware solver...
“Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks” at SysML 2018
This Friday, I’m headed over to SysML to present “Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks”, co-authored with Guy Katz, Justin Gottschl...
Using the simplex algorithm for SMT solving
This year, as I’ve started to dive into neural network verification, I’ve had the chance to learn a little about how SMT solvers are implemented. One thing ...
Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they’re supposed to: where we are, where we’re going (part 2 of 2)
A few months ago, my group at Intel Labs began sponsoring and collaborating with a team of researchers at Stanford who are extending the capabilities of auto...
Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they’re supposed to: where we are, where we’re going (part 1 of 2)
Neural networks are turning up everywhere these days, including in safety-critical systems, such as autonomous driving and flight control systems. When these...
Thoughts on “Safety Verification of Deep Neural Networks”
A couple months back, I wrote about Pulina and Tacchella’s 2010 paper on verification of safety properties of neural networks. That paper is the earliest th...
Thoughts on “An Abstraction-Refinement Approach to Verification of Artificial Neural Networks”
Neural networks (NNs) have become a ubiquitous machine learning technique in a wide range of domains. In 2003, some researchers surveyed the literature on v...
teaching
Course announcement: Distributed Software Systems: Global-First and Local-First Perspectives
This winter, I once again have the chance to offer a graduate seminar course on any topic I want. (Yay!) A couple months ago, I brainstormed a list of topi...
Teaching roundup, 2018-2022
I just finished cleaning up some older course websites and (finally!) switching all my stuff to use HTTPS. In honor of that, here’s a roundup of all the cou...
CAREER: Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Refinement Types
Friends, I’m very happy to announce that I received an NSF CAREER Award to support my research at the intersection of distributed systems, programming langua...
CSE138 returns to Twitch today!
TL;DR: Starting today, March 30, 2021, I’m live-streaming my undergraduate distributed systems course on Twitch every Tuesday and Thursday for the next ten w...
Course retrospective: SMT Solving and Solver-Aided Systems
Last fall, at the start of my second year at UC Santa Cruz, I taught a graduate seminar on SMT solving and solver-aided systems!
Twitch plays CSE138
For obvious reasons, this quarter I’m teaching my undergrad distributed systems course, CSE138, to over 100 students remotely instead of in person.
Course announcement: SMT Solving and Solver-Aided Systems
This fall, I’m teaching a graduate seminar on a topic I’m very excited about: the design and implementation of SMT solvers, solver-aided languages, and solve...
My first year as a professor
On July 1, I celebrated my first anniversary of employment as an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz! As my second year gets under way, now seems like a go...
My students made zines, and so can you(rs)!
This spring, I taught our undergrad distributed systems course here at UC Santa Cruz for the first time! It was a blast, and one of the most fun things abou...
An example run of the Chandy-Lamport snapshot algorithm
In the undergrad distributed systems course I’m teaching this spring, I decided I wanted to discuss the Chandy-Lamport algorithm for snapshotting the global ...
Course retrospective: Languages and Abstractions for Distributed Programming
My first term here at UC Santa Cruz has wrapped up, and with it, my graduate seminar course, Languages and Abstractions for Distributed Programming. I had a...
An introduction to replica conflict resolution
A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to do a guest lecture in my colleague Peter Alvaro’s undergrad distributed systems course! Peter is well-known as an...
Course announcement: Languages and Abstractions for Distributed Programming
Hi, friends! This fall will be my first quarter teaching at UC Santa Cruz! I’m very excited to announce that this fall I’m teaching a graduate seminar on o...
Intel Labs
“Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL” will appear at ECOOP 2017
I’m very happy to announce that “Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL”, by Todd Anderson, Paul Liu, Ehsan Totoni, Jan Vitek, Tatiana Shpeisman, and me...
s/S/C/
It’s been nearly half a year since it happened, so it’s probably about time I mentioned it: the group I originally joined at Intel Labs, the Programming Syst...
The first ten minutes of my JuliaCon talk
Last week, I presented a talk at JuliaCon 2016 about ParallelAccelerator.jl. Thanks to everyone at JuliaCon for being a great audience for this talk!
“An introduction to ParallelAccelerator.jl” on the Julia blog
This month, I have a guest post, “An introduction to ParallelAccelerator.jl”, appearing on the Julia blog!
Off the Beaten Track 2016 program chair’s report
Off the Beaten Track at POPL 2016)
My talk on Prospect and ParallelAccelerator.jl at SPLASH-I 2015
I just got back from SPLASH 2015, held in beautiful and topologically interesting Pittsburgh!1 While there, I gave a talk in the SPLASH-I track, and thanks ...
I’m speaking at SPLASH 2015
I’m going to be on stage a couple of times at the SPLASH conference this October in Pittsburgh. If you’ll be there, please say hello!
A month of daily check-ins
Some time ago, in response to my asking what I should write about on this blog, Sumana suggested I write about what my typical day is like. I demurred, sayi...
To OpenCL from JavaScript via js-ctypes, or, how we rewrote the River Trail Firefox extension
Last September, I began contributing to River Trail, an experimental API for data-parallel programming in JavaScript. It’s been my main project for the last...
The Programming Systems Lab is hiring research interns for summer 2015
The Programming Systems Lab, the group that I recently joined at Intel Labs, is hiring Ph.D. student interns for next summer!
What I’m doing after graduation
For the last few months, as I’ve been getting ready to finish up grad school, I’ve also spent a lot of time working on figuring out what I’m going to do once...
papers
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
Two papers at HATRA
Today my students Gan Shen and Patrick Redmond and I are (virtually) attending the HATRA workshop co-located with SPLASH. HATRA is a relatively new workshop...
“Toward Domain-Specific Solvers for Distributed Consistency” will appear at SNAPL 2019
This year at SNAPL, I’ll be presenting a new paper, co-authored with my colleague Peter Alvaro, that collects our recent thinking on consistency-aware solver...
“Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL” will appear at ECOOP 2017
I’m very happy to announce that “Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL”, by Todd Anderson, Paul Liu, Ehsan Totoni, Jan Vitek, Tatiana Shpeisman, and me...
Draft: “Deterministic Threshold Queries of Distributed Data Structures”
I’m happy to announce a draft paper on my work (in collaboration with my advisor, Ryan Newton) on bringing LVar-style threshold reads to the setting of C(v)R...
“Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo” and the PLDI artifact evaluation process
My co-authors Aaron Todd, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Ryan Newton, and I have just finished up the camera-ready version of our new paper, “Taming the Parallel Effec...
New paper draft: “Joining Forces”
I’m happy to announce a new draft paper, “Joining Forces: Toward a Unified Account of LVars and Convergent Replicated Data Types”, that my advisor and I just...
“Freeze After Writing” will appear at POPL 2014
My co-authors Aaron Turon, Neel Krishnaswami, Ryan Newton, and I are very happy to announce that our paper “Freeze After Writing: Quasi-Deterministic Paralle...
Two LVars papers
Greetings from surprisingly sunny Portland, Oregon: [“LVars: Lattice-based Data Structures for Deterministic Parallelism”]: [FHPC ‘13]: http://hiperfit.dk/...
A new paper draft, and a debugging story
I’m excited to announce a new paper draft, “LVars: Deterministic Parallelism through Shared Monotonic Data Structures”, that my advisor Ryan and I just submi...
CRDTs
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
CAREER: Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Refinement Types
Friends, I’m very happy to announce that I received an NSF CAREER Award to support my research at the intersection of distributed systems, programming langua...
What’s the difference between LVars and CRDTs?
Greetings from Κεφαλονιά!
A few notes from PaPoC 2015
I spent last week in beautiful Bordeaux, France, attending EuroSys 2015 and the affiliated PaPoC workshop. This was my first EuroSys, as well as my first no...
Draft: “Deterministic Threshold Queries of Distributed Data Structures”
I’m happy to announce a draft paper on my work (in collaboration with my advisor, Ryan Newton) on bringing LVar-style threshold reads to the setting of C(v)R...
Two LVars papers at WoDet
In a couple of days, I’m headed to the WoDet workshop, which is co-located with ASPLOS in Salt Lake City this year. WoDet is a workshop devoted to determini...
New paper draft: “Joining Forces”
I’m happy to announce a new draft paper, “Joining Forces: Toward a Unified Account of LVars and Convergent Replicated Data Types”, that my advisor and I just...
My thesis proposal, and my second Hacker School residency
I’ve just posted a draft of my thesis proposal, which, barring disaster, I’ll be presenting to my research committee next Friday. To spill the beans, here’s...
Thoughts on CRDTs and threshold reads
Update (November 30, 2013): I updated this post to reflect some of my current thinking on threshold reads for CRDTs and why I think high-water-mark reads are...
What’s the deal with LVars and CRDTs?
Earlier this week, I gave a talk on LVars at RICON West, a distributed systems industry conference. It covered a lot of the same material as my talk at FHPC...
DSLs
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2018
This year, I’m again serving as a co-chair of the Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop, together with my friend Sam Tobin-Hochstadt. ...
Notes on Halide and Distributed Halide
Halide is a newish domain-specific language for writing high-performance image processing pipelines, originally created by a group of researchers at MIT and ...
“Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL” will appear at ECOOP 2017
I’m very happy to announce that “Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL”, by Todd Anderson, Paul Liu, Ehsan Totoni, Jan Vitek, Tatiana Shpeisman, and me...
What isn’t a high-performance DSL?
At work, I’ve been participating in a series of broad-ranging discussions about the role that domain-specific languages, or DSLs, can play in helping program...
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2017
This year, Eric Walkingshaw and I are serving as co-chairs of DSLDI, the Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop, co-located with SPLASH ...
The first ten minutes of my JuliaCon talk
Last week, I presented a talk at JuliaCon 2016 about ParallelAccelerator.jl. Thanks to everyone at JuliaCon for being a great audience for this talk!
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2016
I’m serving on the program committee for this year’s Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop (DSLDI). The workshop will be co-located wi...
Some notes from SPLASH 2015
Last month, I headed to Pittsburgh for SPLASH 2015. Sadly, the trip was brief, since I had to leave the conference early to make it to a friend’s wedding, b...
Embedding, deep and shallow
Not long ago, I wanted to better understand the notions of “deeply” and “shallowly” embedded languages. Here I mean “embedded” in the sense of, say, “domain...
SPLASH
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2018
This year, I’m again serving as a co-chair of the Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop, together with my friend Sam Tobin-Hochstadt. ...
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2017
This year, Eric Walkingshaw and I are serving as co-chairs of DSLDI, the Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop, co-located with SPLASH ...
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2016
I’m serving on the program committee for this year’s Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop (DSLDI). The workshop will be co-located wi...
Some notes from SPLASH 2015
Last month, I headed to Pittsburgh for SPLASH 2015. Sadly, the trip was brief, since I had to leave the conference early to make it to a friend’s wedding, b...
My talk on Prospect and ParallelAccelerator.jl at SPLASH-I 2015
I just got back from SPLASH 2015, held in beautiful and topologically interesting Pittsburgh!1 While there, I gave a talk in the SPLASH-I track, and thanks ...
I’m speaking at SPLASH 2015
I’m going to be on stage a couple of times at the SPLASH conference this October in Pittsburgh. If you’ll be there, please say hello!
Call for papers: Onward! 2015
The Onward! 2015 conference has opened their call for papers, and I’m very excited to be serving on the program committee this year!
Notes from the “Energy and Performance” session at OOPSLA
Last week I went to Portland to catch the part of the SPLASH1 conference known as OOPSLA. I attended fourteen2 OOPSLA talks, often paying attention! ...
distributed consistency
“Toward Domain-Specific Solvers for Distributed Consistency” will appear at SNAPL 2019
This year at SNAPL, I’ll be presenting a new paper, co-authored with my colleague Peter Alvaro, that collects our recent thinking on consistency-aware solver...
Course retrospective: Languages and Abstractions for Distributed Programming
My first term here at UC Santa Cruz has wrapped up, and with it, my graduate seminar course, Languages and Abstractions for Distributed Programming. I had a...
An introduction to replica conflict resolution
A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to do a guest lecture in my colleague Peter Alvaro’s undergrad distributed systems course! Peter is well-known as an...
Course announcement: Languages and Abstractions for Distributed Programming
Hi, friends! This fall will be my first quarter teaching at UC Santa Cruz! I’m very excited to announce that this fall I’m teaching a graduate seminar on o...
A few notes from PaPoC 2015
I spent last week in beautiful Bordeaux, France, attending EuroSys 2015 and the affiliated PaPoC workshop. This was my first EuroSys, as well as my first no...
Call for submissions: PaPoC 2015
I’m excited to be serving on the program committee for this year’s Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC). The work...
What’s the deal with LVars and CRDTs?
Earlier this week, I gave a talk on LVars at RICON West, a distributed systems industry conference. It covered a lot of the same material as my talk at FHPC...
OBT
Where does OBT research go after OBT?
A friend who’s listened to me hype up the Off the Beaten Track workshops for the past several years now asks:
Call for talk proposals: OBT 2017
It’s time once again to sound the call for talk proposals for the Off the Beaten Track workshop, the next edition of which will be co-located with POPL 2017 ...
Off the Beaten Track 2016 program chair’s report
Off the Beaten Track at POPL 2016)
Call for participation: Off the Beaten Track 2016
We’re gearing up for the 2016 Off the Beaten Track workshop, co-located with POPL in St. Petersburg, Florida next month. If you’ve never been to OBT, it’s a...
Two announcements about OBT: invited speakers and funding for speaker expenses
The submission deadline for Off the Beaten Track is coming up in a bit over a week! I’m looking forward to seeing your talk proposals. In the meantime, I h...
Call for submissions: Off the Beaten Track 2016
It’s that time again. The call for talk submissions for Off the Beaten Track 2016 is open, and this year I have the honor of serving as the program chair!
Call for submissions: Off the Beaten Track 2015
The call for submissions for Off the Beaten Track 2015 is open, and I’m very excited and proud to be serving on the program committee this year!
Julia
The case of the missing frames
In my last post, I wrote about a wave equation simulation that I spent a lot of time with as part of my ParallelAccelerator for Julia benchmarking effort. T...
The optimization that wasn’t
Between mid-2015 and mid-2017, I spent a lot of time on performance measurement for the ParallelAccelerator package for Julia. I curated a collection of wor...
“Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL” will appear at ECOOP 2017
I’m very happy to announce that “Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL”, by Todd Anderson, Paul Liu, Ehsan Totoni, Jan Vitek, Tatiana Shpeisman, and me...
The first ten minutes of my JuliaCon talk
Last week, I presented a talk at JuliaCon 2016 about ParallelAccelerator.jl. Thanks to everyone at JuliaCon for being a great audience for this talk!
“An introduction to ParallelAccelerator.jl” on the Julia blog
This month, I have a guest post, “An introduction to ParallelAccelerator.jl”, appearing on the Julia blog!
My talk on Prospect and ParallelAccelerator.jl at SPLASH-I 2015
I just got back from SPLASH 2015, held in beautiful and topologically interesting Pittsburgh!1 While there, I gave a talk in the SPLASH-I track, and thanks ...
I’m speaking at SPLASH 2015
I’m going to be on stage a couple of times at the SPLASH conference this October in Pittsburgh. If you’ll be there, please say hello!
ParallelAccelerator
The optimization that wasn’t
Between mid-2015 and mid-2017, I spent a lot of time on performance measurement for the ParallelAccelerator package for Julia. I curated a collection of wor...
“Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL” will appear at ECOOP 2017
I’m very happy to announce that “Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL”, by Todd Anderson, Paul Liu, Ehsan Totoni, Jan Vitek, Tatiana Shpeisman, and me...
What isn’t a high-performance DSL?
At work, I’ve been participating in a series of broad-ranging discussions about the role that domain-specific languages, or DSLs, can play in helping program...
The first ten minutes of my JuliaCon talk
Last week, I presented a talk at JuliaCon 2016 about ParallelAccelerator.jl. Thanks to everyone at JuliaCon for being a great audience for this talk!
“An introduction to ParallelAccelerator.jl” on the Julia blog
This month, I have a guest post, “An introduction to ParallelAccelerator.jl”, appearing on the Julia blog!
My talk on Prospect and ParallelAccelerator.jl at SPLASH-I 2015
I just got back from SPLASH 2015, held in beautiful and topologically interesting Pittsburgh!1 While there, I gave a talk in the SPLASH-I track, and thanks ...
I’m speaking at SPLASH 2015
I’m going to be on stage a couple of times at the SPLASH conference this October in Pittsburgh. If you’ll be there, please say hello!
machine learning
“Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks” at SysML 2018
This Friday, I’m headed over to SysML to present “Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks”, co-authored with Guy Katz, Justin Gottschl...
Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they’re supposed to: where we are, where we’re going (part 2 of 2)
A few months ago, my group at Intel Labs began sponsoring and collaborating with a team of researchers at Stanford who are extending the capabilities of auto...
Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they’re supposed to: where we are, where we’re going (part 1 of 2)
Neural networks are turning up everywhere these days, including in safety-critical systems, such as autonomous driving and flight control systems. When these...
Thoughts on “Safety Verification of Deep Neural Networks”
A couple months back, I wrote about Pulina and Tacchella’s 2010 paper on verification of safety properties of neural networks. That paper is the earliest th...
An economics analogy for why adversarial examples work
One of the most interesting results from “Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples” is the idea that adversarial examples for a machine learning model ...
Thoughts on “An Abstraction-Refinement Approach to Verification of Artificial Neural Networks”
Neural networks (NNs) have become a ubiquitous machine learning technique in a wide range of domains. In 2003, some researchers surveyed the literature on v...
Thoughts on “Adversarial examples in the physical world”
In machine learning, computers “learn” by being shown lots of examples; for instance, we might use millions of pictures to train a model that can identify pi...
POPL
Apply to PLMW
The Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop, or PLMW, is a one-day event that’s held on the day before the main conference program starts at the four major ...
Call for talk proposals: OBT 2017
It’s time once again to sound the call for talk proposals for the Off the Beaten Track workshop, the next edition of which will be co-located with POPL 2017 ...
Two announcements about OBT: invited speakers and funding for speaker expenses
The submission deadline for Off the Beaten Track is coming up in a bit over a week! I’m looking forward to seeing your talk proposals. In the meantime, I h...
How to freeze after writing
Last week at POPL, I presented “Freeze After Writing: Quasi-Deterministic Parallel Programming with LVars”. In this paper, my co-authors Aaron Turon, Neel ...
“Freeze After Writing” will appear at POPL 2014
My co-authors Aaron Turon, Neel Krishnaswami, Ryan Newton, and I are very happy to announce that our paper “Freeze After Writing: Quasi-Deterministic Paralle...
Determinism abides
On a trip to Europe last month, I was scheduled to give three talks about my research on deterministic parallelism. The talks all had the same topic, but wi...
language implementation
My first fifteen compilers
Update (July 2019): A revised version of this post now appears on PL Perspectives, the SIGPLAN blog.
What do people mean when they say “transpiler”?
A compiler is a computer program that takes a program as input, does some sort of transformation on it, and returns another program. Most of the time, we th...
My talk on Prospect and ParallelAccelerator.jl at SPLASH-I 2015
I just got back from SPLASH 2015, held in beautiful and topologically interesting Pittsburgh!1 While there, I gave a talk in the SPLASH-I track, and thanks ...
Embedding, deep and shallow
Not long ago, I wanted to better understand the notions of “deeply” and “shallowly” embedded languages. Here I mean “embedded” in the sense of, say, “domain...
Write an interpreter: variables
This post is the second in a series. Last time, we started coding up a toy interpreter for a language of arithmetic expressions. This time, we’ll extend th...
Write an interpreter
I spent last week volunteering as a resident at Hacker School, where I helped a number of students write small interpreters. For the most part, the students...
neural networks
“Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks” at SysML 2018
This Friday, I’m headed over to SysML to present “Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks”, co-authored with Guy Katz, Justin Gottschl...
Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they’re supposed to: where we are, where we’re going (part 2 of 2)
A few months ago, my group at Intel Labs began sponsoring and collaborating with a team of researchers at Stanford who are extending the capabilities of auto...
Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they’re supposed to: where we are, where we’re going (part 1 of 2)
Neural networks are turning up everywhere these days, including in safety-critical systems, such as autonomous driving and flight control systems. When these...
Thoughts on “Safety Verification of Deep Neural Networks”
A couple months back, I wrote about Pulina and Tacchella’s 2010 paper on verification of safety properties of neural networks. That paper is the earliest th...
Thoughts on “An Abstraction-Refinement Approach to Verification of Artificial Neural Networks”
Neural networks (NNs) have become a ubiquitous machine learning technique in a wide range of domains. In 2003, some researchers surveyed the literature on v...
Thoughts on “Adversarial examples in the physical world”
In machine learning, computers “learn” by being shown lots of examples; for instance, we might use millions of pictures to train a model that can identify pi...
ICFP
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
Join us at the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop at ICFP next month
The Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop is a fun and free event for people who want to learn about careers in programming languages (PL) research. The...
Yet another post telling you to apply to PLMW
Along with Nate Foster and Talia Ringer, I’m organizing the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop, or PLMW, in conjunction with the International Conferen...
The call for papers formerly known as ICFP
2018 will be my third and final year serving as the publicity chair for ICFP, the International Conference on Functional Programming. So, not too long ago, ...
Participating in ICFP remotely
This year’s International Conference on Functional Programming, or ICFP ‘17 to its friends, will be getting under way in Oxford, UK in just a couple of days....
The fine print in the ICFP 2017 call for papers
This year, I’m excited to be serving on the program committee for ICFP, the annual academic conference on the theory and practice of functional programming. ...
Recurse Center
My adventures with git-filter-branch
Not too long ago, I found myself in a tricky situation with git. I had an enormous git repo containing a few things I wanted to keep and many, many things I...
My thesis proposal, and my second Hacker School residency
I’ve just posted a draft of my thesis proposal, which, barring disaster, I’ll be presenting to my research committee next Friday. To spill the beans, here’s...
Some misconceptions about Hacker School
Update (March 25, 2015): As of today, Hacker School is called the Recurse Center. Everything in this post still applies!
Write an interpreter
I spent last week volunteering as a resident at Hacker School, where I helped a number of students write small interpreters. For the most part, the students...
Hacker School residency
Update (March 25, 2015): As of today, Hacker School is called the Recurse Center. Everything in this post still applies!
grad school
How not to email prospective grad school advisors
It’s grad school application season1, which means that prospective students have been emailing potential faculty advisors. In my field, computer science, th...
You don’t need a 4.0 to go to grad school
Recently on Twitter, Justine Sherry pointed out (in response to hearing about a student afraid to minor in art because they thought it would hurt their appli...
Should you do an MS before doing a Ph.D.?
On the Recurse Center’s Zulip community, someone posted this request for advice recently:
Getting into a Ph.D. program without previous research experience
Several weeks ago, I got this email from a reader of my blog:
Things you can do to get ready for PL grad school
I recently got an email from someone who was about to graduate with an undergrad CS degree and was interested in pursuing programming languages research. Th...
adversarial examples
“Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks” at SysML 2018
This Friday, I’m headed over to SysML to present “Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks”, co-authored with Guy Katz, Justin Gottschl...
Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they’re supposed to: where we are, where we’re going (part 2 of 2)
A few months ago, my group at Intel Labs began sponsoring and collaborating with a team of researchers at Stanford who are extending the capabilities of auto...
Thoughts on “Safety Verification of Deep Neural Networks”
A couple months back, I wrote about Pulina and Tacchella’s 2010 paper on verification of safety properties of neural networks. That paper is the earliest th...
An economics analogy for why adversarial examples work
One of the most interesting results from “Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples” is the idea that adversarial examples for a machine learning model ...
Thoughts on “Adversarial examples in the physical world”
In machine learning, computers “learn” by being shown lots of examples; for instance, we might use millions of pictures to train a model that can identify pi...
neural network verification
“Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks” at SysML 2018
This Friday, I’m headed over to SysML to present “Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks”, co-authored with Guy Katz, Justin Gottschl...
Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they’re supposed to: where we are, where we’re going (part 2 of 2)
A few months ago, my group at Intel Labs began sponsoring and collaborating with a team of researchers at Stanford who are extending the capabilities of auto...
Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they’re supposed to: where we are, where we’re going (part 1 of 2)
Neural networks are turning up everywhere these days, including in safety-critical systems, such as autonomous driving and flight control systems. When these...
Thoughts on “Safety Verification of Deep Neural Networks”
A couple months back, I wrote about Pulina and Tacchella’s 2010 paper on verification of safety properties of neural networks. That paper is the earliest th...
Thoughts on “An Abstraction-Refinement Approach to Verification of Artificial Neural Networks”
Neural networks (NNs) have become a ubiquitous machine learning technique in a wide range of domains. In 2003, some researchers surveyed the literature on v...
Liquid Haskell
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
My FLOPS 2022 keynote talk: “Adventures in Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Liquid Haskell”
Back in May, I gave the opening keynote (my first keynote talk!) at the FLOPS 2022 conference. I talked about the work we’ve been doing in my group on using...
CAREER: Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Refinement Types
Friends, I’m very happy to announce that I received an NSF CAREER Award to support my research at the intersection of distributed systems, programming langua...
Two papers at HATRA
Today my students Gan Shen and Patrick Redmond and I are (virtually) attending the HATRA workshop co-located with SPLASH. HATRA is a relatively new workshop...
refinement types
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
My FLOPS 2022 keynote talk: “Adventures in Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Liquid Haskell”
Back in May, I gave the opening keynote (my first keynote talk!) at the FLOPS 2022 conference. I talked about the work we’ve been doing in my group on using...
CAREER: Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Refinement Types
Friends, I’m very happy to announce that I received an NSF CAREER Award to support my research at the intersection of distributed systems, programming langua...
Two papers at HATRA
Today my students Gan Shen and Patrick Redmond and I are (virtually) attending the HATRA workshop co-located with SPLASH. HATRA is a relatively new workshop...
causal delivery
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
blogging
Celebrating five years of this blog, and a change of pace
I started this blog five years ago, in January 2013. At the time, I lived in Bloomington, Indiana and was in the middle of my fifth year of grad school. I ...
The power of blogging with plain old versioned text
Something I really like about my blogging setup here on composition.al is that my posts are just plain old version-controlled text files. Years ago, Dave He...
Reflections on four years of research blogging
This blog just passed its four-year anniversary! Back in January 2015, I reflected on what my first two years of research blogging had been like. This post...
Reflections on two years of research blogging
I started this blog on January 10th, 2013, so it just recently turned two years old. Here are some observations on keeping a research blog and what I’ve fig...
PLMW
Join us at the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop at ICFP next month
The Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop is a fun and free event for people who want to learn about careers in programming languages (PL) research. The...
Yet another post telling you to apply to PLMW
Along with Nate Foster and Talia Ringer, I’m organizing the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop, or PLMW, in conjunction with the International Conferen...
Apply to PLMW
The Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop, or PLMW, is a one-day event that’s held on the day before the main conference program starts at the four major ...
Where and when should you go to PLMW?
Here’s an anonymized question sent to me by a blog reader:
choreographic programming
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
An underwhelming conversation with ChatGPT
I’ve been getting underway with a new research project, and after seeing what Crista Lopes had to say recently about the potential of ChatGPT as a research t...
Course announcement: Distributed Software Systems: Global-First and Local-First Perspectives
This winter, I once again have the chance to offer a graduate seminar course on any topic I want. (Yay!) A couple months ago, I brainstormed a list of topi...
Rust
Default methods and negative diffstats
Last week, I made a change to the Rust compiler that I’ve wanted to make for over a year. I was so happy about finally getting this patch in that I couldn’t...
One-character patches
Yesterday, I made my first contribution to Racket in the form of a one-character patch. (It corrected a typo in a menu item for one of the Redex visualizati...
FizzBuzz revisited
One of the cool things about being involved with the development of Rust over the last couple of years has been watching the community grow along with the la...
Racket
A simple but difficult arithmetic puzzle, and the rabbit hole it took me down
A while back, Mark Dominus proposed an arithmetic puzzle: combine the numbers 6, 6, 5, and 2 with arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplicatio...
One-character patches
Yesterday, I made my first contribution to Racket in the form of a one-character patch. (It corrected a typo in a menu item for one of the Redex visualizati...
Writing macros that write Redex
Over the last year or two, I’ve been using PLT Redex more and more often as a tool for my research. Redex is a domain-specific programming language and suit...
River Trail
Browser extensions are kernel modules for browsers
Back in October, after a few weeks of working on the River Trail Firefox extension, I had a trite epiphany: if a browser is an OS, then extensions are kernel...
To OpenCL from JavaScript via js-ctypes, or, how we rewrote the River Trail Firefox extension
Last September, I began contributing to River Trail, an experimental API for data-parallel programming in JavaScript. It’s been my main project for the last...
What I’m doing after graduation
For the last few months, as I’ve been getting ready to finish up grad school, I’ve also spent a lot of time working on figuring out what I’m going to do once...
captions
How to create an .srt caption file for a video
Let’s say you’re giving a talk, and you’ve been asked to provide a caption file in .srt format along with a pre-recorded video of your talk. How should you ...
Captioning videos: a fun and easy way to contribute to !!Con right now
For the last two years, I’ve helped put on !!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”), the radically inclusive conference about the joy, excitement, and surprise of ...
Your next conference should have real-time captioning
I was one of the organizers of !!Con, a free conference about the joy, excitement and surprise of programming that happened two weeks ago in New York.
IFL
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
Call for papers: IFL 2015
Once again this year, I’m serving on the program committee for IFL, the annual Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages, and the c...
Call for papers: IFL 2014
This year, I’m on the program committee for IFL, the annual Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages. It’ll be held at Northeaste...
PaPoC
Call for submissions: PaPoC 2018
I’m serving on the program committee for the 2018 Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data, co-located with EuroSys ‘18 in Por...
A few notes from PaPoC 2015
I spent last week in beautiful Bordeaux, France, attending EuroSys 2015 and the affiliated PaPoC workshop. This was my first EuroSys, as well as my first no...
Call for submissions: PaPoC 2015
I’m excited to be serving on the program committee for this year’s Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC). The work...
DSLDI
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2018
This year, I’m again serving as a co-chair of the Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop, together with my friend Sam Tobin-Hochstadt. ...
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2017
This year, Eric Walkingshaw and I are serving as co-chairs of DSLDI, the Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop, co-located with SPLASH ...
Call for talk proposals: DSLDI 2016
I’m serving on the program committee for this year’s Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop (DSLDI). The workshop will be co-located wi...
debugging
The case of the missing frames
In my last post, I wrote about a wave equation simulation that I spent a lot of time with as part of my ParallelAccelerator for Julia benchmarking effort. T...
The optimization that wasn’t
Between mid-2015 and mid-2017, I spent a lot of time on performance measurement for the ParallelAccelerator package for Julia. I curated a collection of wor...
My adventures with git-filter-branch
Not too long ago, I found myself in a tricky situation with git. I had an enormous git repo containing a few things I wanted to keep and many, many things I...
UC Santa Cruz
Why you should come to UC Santa Cruz to do LSD research
It’s Ph.D. application season! A few months back, Paulette Koronkevich wrote a guide to applying to programming languages grad school that included the sent...
My first year as a professor
On July 1, I celebrated my first anniversary of employment as an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz! As my second year gets under way, now seems like a go...
Back to school
Friends, I have some big news!
zines
CAREER: Building Reliable Distributed Systems with Refinement Types
Friends, I’m very happy to announce that I received an NSF CAREER Award to support my research at the intersection of distributed systems, programming langua...
My students made zines, and so can you(rs)!
This spring, I taught our undergrad distributed systems course here at UC Santa Cruz for the first time! It was a blast, and one of the most fun things abou...
pattern matching
A new paper draft, and a debugging story
I’m excited to announce a new paper draft, “LVars: Deterministic Parallelism through Shared Monotonic Data Structures”, that my advisor Ryan and I just submi...
FizzBuzz revisited
One of the cool things about being involved with the development of Rust over the last couple of years has been watching the community grow along with the la...
write an interpreter
Write an interpreter: variables
This post is the second in a series. Last time, we started coding up a toy interpreter for a language of arithmetic expressions. This time, we’ll extend th...
Write an interpreter
I spent last week volunteering as a resident at Hacker School, where I helped a number of students write small interpreters. For the most part, the students...
FHPC
Some FHPC and Haskell Symposium highlights
I just got home from a great week in Boston, where I attended this year’s ICFP and affiliated events. I presented our first paper on LVars at the FHPC works...
Two LVars papers
Greetings from surprisingly sunny Portland, Oregon: [“LVars: Lattice-based Data Structures for Deterministic Parallelism”]: [FHPC ‘13]: http://hiperfit.dk/...
concurrency
Yet another blog post about how parallelism is not concurrency
Recently, an acquaintance asked for an explanation of the difference between parallelism and concurrency. Blog posts about how parallelism is not concurrenc...
Interpreting LVar effects as resources
Lately I’ve been thinking about an analogy between properties that are and aren’t true of LVar operations, and presence or lack of structural rules in a logi...
substructural logic
My adventures with git-filter-branch
Not too long ago, I found myself in a tricky situation with git. I had an enormous git repo containing a few things I wanted to keep and many, many things I...
Interpreting LVar effects as resources
Lately I’ve been thinking about an analogy between properties that are and aren’t true of LVar operations, and presence or lack of structural rules in a logi...
Haskell Symposium
Call for submissions: 2014 Haskell Symposium
The call for submissions is open for this year’s Haskell Symposium. It will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden this September, and will be co-located, as is trad...
Some FHPC and Haskell Symposium highlights
I just got home from a great week in Boston, where I attended this year’s ICFP and affiliated events. I presented our first paper on LVars at the FHPC works...
that wasn't
The optimization that wasn’t
Between mid-2015 and mid-2017, I spent a lot of time on performance measurement for the ParallelAccelerator package for Julia. I curated a collection of wor...
The LVar that wasn’t
Suppose we want to write a program in which two threads, say, t1 and t2, each contribute a Boolean value, either True or False, to a shared result. If both ...
PLDI
A one-minute talk about “Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo”
At PLDI a few weeks ago, my advisor Ryan Newton presented our paper “Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo: Extensible Deterministic Parallelism with LVish”. This ...
“Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo” and the PLDI artifact evaluation process
My co-authors Aaron Todd, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Ryan Newton, and I have just finished up the camera-ready version of our new paper, “Taming the Parallel Effec...
interviews
‘Experiencing computing viscerally’: my PG Podcast interview about !!Con
A few days ago, I had the fun experience of being interviewed by Philip Guo for his excellent new podcast series. Phil invites his interview subjects to dis...
What I do all day, as told to a first-year CS student
A few weeks ago, I had the fun and thought-provoking experience of being interviewed about my career by a first-year college student. Conducting an intervie...
Onward!
Some notes from SPLASH 2015
Last month, I headed to Pittsburgh for SPLASH 2015. Sadly, the trip was brief, since I had to leave the conference early to make it to a friend’s wedding, b...
Call for papers: Onward! 2015
The Onward! 2015 conference has opened their call for papers, and I’m very excited to be serving on the program committee this year!
JavaScript
Browser extensions are kernel modules for browsers
Back in October, after a few weeks of working on the River Trail Firefox extension, I had a trite epiphany: if a browser is an OS, then extensions are kernel...
To OpenCL from JavaScript via js-ctypes, or, how we rewrote the River Trail Firefox extension
Last September, I began contributing to River Trail, an experimental API for data-parallel programming in JavaScript. It’s been my main project for the last...
what isn't
What isn’t a high-performance DSL?
At work, I’ve been participating in a series of broad-ranging discussions about the role that domain-specific languages, or DSLs, can play in helping program...
What isn’t a key-value store?
So there’s this website called DB-Engines that ranks database systems according to their popularity. (They determine popularity based on various factors, in...
Python
My adventures with git-filter-branch
Not too long ago, I found myself in a tricky situation with git. I had an enormous git repo containing a few things I wanted to keep and many, many things I...
A better way to add labels to bar charts with matplotlib
Lately, I’ve been using Python’s matplotlib plotting library to generate a lot of figures, such as, for instance, the bar charts I showed in this talk.
type checking
Why does a Turing-complete type system make type checking undecidable?
Last May, I wrote about an article by Radu Grigore that claimed that “all Java type checkers have bugs”, and what that claim might have meant. Later, Grigor...
Do ‘all Java type checkers have bugs’?
Update (February 2017): I’ve written a follow-up to this post!
decidability
Why does a Turing-complete type system make type checking undecidable?
Last May, I wrote about an article by Radu Grigore that claimed that “all Java type checkers have bugs”, and what that claim might have meant. Later, Grigor...
Do ‘all Java type checkers have bugs’?
Update (February 2017): I’ve written a follow-up to this post!
statistics
Way number eight of looking at the correlation coefficient
This post has an accompanying Jupyter Notebook!
Understanding the regression line with standard units
This post has an accompanying Jupyter Notebook! How do you do, fellow kids?
ten hundred words
I can’t believe I was allowed to say “relationships between ordered sets”
A few days ago, my friend and colleague Tim did the describe-what-you-do-using-only-the-ten-hundred-words-people-use-the-most-often thing. I’d tried to do i...
Redex
Writing macros that write Redex
Over the last year or two, I’ve been using PLT Redex more and more often as a tool for my research. Redex is a domain-specific programming language and suit...
macros
Writing macros that write Redex
Over the last year or two, I’ve been using PLT Redex more and more often as a tool for my research. Redex is a domain-specific programming language and suit...
default methods
Default methods and negative diffstats
Last week, I made a change to the Rust compiler that I’ve wanted to make for over a year. I was so happy about finally getting this patch in that I couldn’t...
RICON
What’s the deal with LVars and CRDTs?
Earlier this week, I gave a talk on LVars at RICON West, a distributed systems industry conference. It covered a lot of the same material as my talk at FHPC...
Bloom
Disorder and determinism
My research on LVars is all about deterministic parallel programming: writing programs so that they can be scheduled onto parallel hardware with the goal of ...
WoDet
Two LVars papers at WoDet
In a couple of days, I’m headed to the WoDet workshop, which is co-located with ASPLOS in Salt Lake City this year. WoDet is a workshop devoted to determini...
separation logic
Frame problems and frame properties
One of the ideas that has been important to me as I’ve worked on LVars is the notion of a frame property. A frame property captures the idea of local reason...
OOPSLA
Notes from the “Energy and Performance” session at OOPSLA
Last week I went to Portland to catch the part of the SPLASH1 conference known as OOPSLA. I attended fourteen2 OOPSLA talks, often paying attention! ...
energy management
Notes from the “Energy and Performance” session at OOPSLA
Last week I went to Portland to catch the part of the SPLASH1 conference known as OOPSLA. I attended fourteen2 OOPSLA talks, often paying attention! ...
Tiny ToCS
One last CFP to wrap up the year: Tiny ToCS
Tiny Transactions on Computer Science, the premier venue for computer science research of 140 characters or less, is seeking submissions for its third volume...
databases
What isn’t a key-value store?
So there’s this website called DB-Engines that ranks database systems according to their popularity. (They determine popularity based on various factors, in...
determinism
How to learn to do determinism proofs
A couple days ago, my advisor asked me what reading material I would suggest to a new student who wants to learn to do determinism proofs like the ones we di...
matplotlib
A better way to add labels to bar charts with matplotlib
Lately, I’ve been using Python’s matplotlib plotting library to generate a lot of figures, such as, for instance, the bar charts I showed in this talk.
refactoring
Refactoring as a way to understand code
Recently, an acquaintance was complaining of a project they were working on that involved reading a mountain of “incidentally complex” code – code that wasn’...
OpenStack
What even is OpenStack?
A few days ago, I needed to learn what OpenStack is. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
what even is
What even is OpenStack?
A few days ago, I needed to learn what OpenStack is. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
Java
Do ‘all Java type checkers have bugs’?
Update (February 2017): I’ve written a follow-up to this post!
Ruby
Publicity chair tip: use ruby-gmail to send bulk emails via Gmail
I’m currently serving a three-year term as the publicity chair for ICFP. Like many conferences, we use a Gmail account for sending publicity emails. If you...
tips
Publicity chair tip: use ruby-gmail to send bulk emails via Gmail
I’m currently serving a three-year term as the publicity chair for ICFP. Like many conferences, we use a Gmail account for sending publicity emails. If you...
open source
The saga of Accumulo bug 4379
Not too long ago, I was setting up an installation of the Accumulo distributed database. At some point in the process, I ran Accumulo’s bin/bootstrap_config...
Accumulo
The saga of Accumulo bug 4379
Not too long ago, I was setting up an installation of the Accumulo distributed database. At some point in the process, I ran Accumulo’s bin/bootstrap_config...
bug tracking
The saga of Accumulo bug 4379
Not too long ago, I was setting up an installation of the Accumulo distributed database. At some point in the process, I ran Accumulo’s bin/bootstrap_config...
git
My adventures with git-filter-branch
Not too long ago, I found myself in a tricky situation with git. I had an enormous git repo containing a few things I wanted to keep and many, many things I...
Scheme
A simple but difficult arithmetic puzzle, and the rabbit hole it took me down
A while back, Mark Dominus proposed an arithmetic puzzle: combine the numbers 6, 6, 5, and 2 with arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplicatio...
combinatorics
A simple but difficult arithmetic puzzle, and the rabbit hole it took me down
A while back, Mark Dominus proposed an arithmetic puzzle: combine the numbers 6, 6, 5, and 2 with arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplicatio...
ECOOP
“Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL” will appear at ECOOP 2017
I’m very happy to announce that “Parallelizing Julia with a Non-Invasive DSL”, by Todd Anderson, Paul Liu, Ehsan Totoni, Jan Vitek, Tatiana Shpeisman, and me...
Halide
Notes on Halide and Distributed Halide
Halide is a newish domain-specific language for writing high-performance image processing pipelines, originally created by a group of researchers at MIT and ...
SysML
“Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks” at SysML 2018
This Friday, I’m headed over to SysML to present “Toward Scalable Verification for Safety-Critical Deep Networks”, co-authored with Guy Katz, Justin Gottschl...
SNAPL
“Toward Domain-Specific Solvers for Distributed Consistency” will appear at SNAPL 2019
This year at SNAPL, I’ll be presenting a new paper, co-authored with my colleague Peter Alvaro, that collects our recent thinking on consistency-aware solver...
HATRA
Two papers at HATRA
Today my students Gan Shen and Patrick Redmond and I are (virtually) attending the HATRA workshop co-located with SPLASH. HATRA is a relatively new workshop...
Agda
Two papers at HATRA
Today my students Gan Shen and Patrick Redmond and I are (virtually) attending the HATRA workshop co-located with SPLASH. HATRA is a relatively new workshop...
typed holes
Two papers at HATRA
Today my students Gan Shen and Patrick Redmond and I are (virtually) attending the HATRA workshop co-located with SPLASH. HATRA is a relatively new workshop...
ChatGPT
An underwhelming conversation with ChatGPT
I’ve been getting underway with a new research project, and after seeing what Crista Lopes had to say recently about the potential of ChatGPT as a research t...
HasChor
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
serverless computing
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
SESAME
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
CALCO
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
coalgebras
Research roundup, 2022-2023
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!