Hello!

I'm writing this post as I pack up to head off to Portland for PLDI 2015.  I'm excited to be attending FCRC again--the first time I attended PLDI was at FCRC 2011.  I was introduced to a lot of great people, some of whom I got to work with in subsequent summers, and it was a great "first conference" experience.

This year, I am serving as PLDI Student Volunteer Co-Chair with my labmate at UMass Amherst, Emma "Frank" Tosch.  We managed to gather a sizable group of students, many of whom are attending PLDI for the first time.  I hope to "pay it forward" by introducing these newcomers to our many friends at PLDI.

Lastly, I am looking forward to finally being able to talk about FlashRelate, work I did with Sumit Gulwani, Ted Hart, and Ben Zorn while I was an intern at Microsoft.  FlashRelate is a tool that lets you perform data wrangling tasks for spreadsheets without having to do any programming.  Instead, you provide sample outputs and the synthesizer brews up a data transformation automatically.  I'm rather proud of the work, because it's quite useable (ask me for a demo!), and because I inadvertently wrote my own constraint solver along the way (when your parents tell you to use Z3, just listen to them!).  My "PLDI preview talk" at IBM TJ Watson, where I am currently spending the summer, gave me the opportunity to polish the pitch a bit, so I should have the kinks worked out by Tuesday.

Come to my talk:

http://conf.researchr.org/event/pldi2015/pldi2015-papers-flashrelate-extracting-relational-data-from-semi-structured-spreadsheets-using-examples

 See you all in Portland!