Monday, May 28, 2012

Greetings from Rome :)

Hello,

I am Emilio Coppa, a student of the M.Sc. in Engineering in Computer Science at University Sapienza of Rome, Italy. My research interests include performance profiling, programming languages, design and analysis of algorithms and data structures.

I will present at PLDI (11 june - Session 2A) the paper "Input-Sensitive Profiling", co-authored with Camil Demetrescu (my advisor) and Irene Finocchi. We propose a new profiling methodology and toolkit for helping developers discover hidden asymptotic inefficiencies in the code. A key feature of our method is the ability to automatically measure the size of the input given to a generic code fragment: to this aim, we propose an effective metric for estimating the input size of a routine and show how to compute it efficiently.

This is my first participation to a conference and I am really excited to meet new people and discuss with them.

Hope to meet you soon in Beijing :)

Emilio

Monday, May 21, 2012

Greetings from Toronto

I am Aws Albarghouthi, a graduate student at the University of Toronto. Last summer, I interned at Microsoft Research in Bangalore, India with Aditya Nori and Sriram Rajamani. In a few weeks, I will be at PLDI presenting our work on parallelizing a large class of top-down interprocedural analyses.

Top-down analyses typically compute summaries for procedures according to a given calling context. They start with the main function, working their way down and analyzing functions according to the calling context in which they are called by their callees. Our key insight is a MapReduce-like technique for distributing analyzing different calling contexts of different procedures to different processor cores. Come to the talk and hear about the exciting experiments and speedups we achieved in verifying Windows device drivers.

This work is part of a bigger verification project, called Yogi, where testing and static analysis are combined to produce efficient verification techniques. Aditya and Sriram will be giving a tutorial on it on June 16th. Be there!

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Hello all!

Hello, my name is Boris Petrov, a M.Sc. student in Artificial Intelligence at Sofia University, Bulgaria. My main research interest is in programming languages.

I will be presenting the paper "Race Detection for Web Application" which is a joint research with Prof. Martin Vechev from ETH Zurich, Manu Sridharan and Julian Dolby, both from IBM Research. We developed a tool, named WebRacer, which dynamically checks web-pages for concurrency errors leading to non-determinism and unwanted behavior.

I am very grateful and excited for the opportunity to visit PLDI, present my summer work in front of the top researchers in the world, get to meet great like-minded people and experience a unique culture! I'm sure it will be a great ride for all of us!

Hope to see you there,
Boris

Greeting from Princeton

Hello, I am Feng Liu, a 3rd year Ph.D. student at Princeton University, USA, currently working with Prof. David August and the Liberty Research Group in CS Department. My research interests broadly include program analysis, compiler transformation and run-time system, focus on programming systems for modern computer architectures.

This year, I will be presenting a paper entitled "Dynamic Synthesis for Relaxed Memory Models" at PLDI. This paper was a collaboration with Prof. Martin Vechev from ETH Zurich, Prof. Eran Yahav from Technion, Nayden Nedev and Nedyalko Prisadnikov, who I met when I was interning at IBM T J Watson Lab last summer. Here I sincerely thank my mentors Prof. Martin Vechev and Prof. Eran Yahav, for providing me with thorough and insightful supervising during this project. And also I would like anyone who is interested in this work to come to my talk!

There are lots of reasons why I'm so excited by attending PLDI'12. First of all, this is the first time I am going to give a talk and learn from best researchers on such a top conference. Second, this is the first time PLDI is held in China and Asia. It recalls me the wonderful years I spent and wonderful friends I met in Beijing.  This time I look forward to meeting you and making new friends there!

See you soon!
Feng

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Greetings from Fudan


Hello everyone,

I’m Zhenman Fang, a first-year Ph.D. student at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. I work in the ARchitecture Team (ART) of Parallel Processing Institute, under the supervision of Prof. Binyu Zang and Prof. Weihua Zhang. My research interests include computer architecture, simulation and program analysis.

This year I will present our paper "Improving Dynamic Prediction Accuracy Through Multi-level Phase Analysis", co-authored with Jiaxin Li, Weihua Zhang, Yi Li, Haibo Chen and Binyu Zang at LCTES 2012. This paper presents a simple and interesting idea to improve prediction accuracy in dynamic optimization systems through multi-level phase analysis. Come and check it out!

I am looking forward to attending these conferences, learning of the latest research done by top researchers, as well as sharing our research interests and life experiences. As a native, I have visited Beijing a couple of times and it’s really an amazing city. I would like to show you around in case you need a native guide:-)

Hope to meet you soon in Beijing!

Zhenman

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Greetings from Rice

Hello everyone,

I'm Alina Sbirlea, a 3rd year Ph.D. student at Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA, working with Prof. Vivek Sarkar in the Habanero Multicore Software Research Group.
My research interests include compiler techniques, scheduling decisions and runtime optimizations, applied in particular for heterogeneous architectures.

This year I will be presenting at LCTES our paper on "Mapping a Data-flow Programming Model onto Heterogeneous Platforms", co-authored with Yi Zou, Zoran Budimlic, Jason Cong and Vivek Sarkar. I would be happy to see you there! This work is done in collaboration with University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) as part of an on-going project: Center for Domain Specific Computing. It is a challenging and greatly rewarding project. Check out our research goal!

I am looking forward to attending these conferences for the first time, learning of the latest research done by top researchers and well as meeting them and learning of their interests. It will also be my first visit to China and I plan to make the best of it while I'm there.

See you soon!
Alina

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Greetings from Princeton

Hello.  I am Nick Johnson, a 4th year PhD student working with Professor David August and the Liberty Research Group at Princeton.  My research interests broadly include program analysis and transformation, and focus on automatic parallelization of general purpose applications for multicore architectures.  You can meet me at PLDI in Beijing!

This year, I will be presenting a paper entitled "Speculative Separation for Privatization and Reductions."  This paper was a collaboration with Hanjun Kim, Prakash Prabhu, Ayal Zaks, and David August.  Come check it out!

I'm excited because PLDI'12 is a top venue for cutting-edge research.  The talks will inspire you to look at your research in a different way.  Plus it will take place in Beijing. I've never been to China before and I intend to explore the greater Beijing area after the conference, so let me know if you need an adventurous travel companion.

I look forward to meeting you all.
Nick