Post-PLDI 2016

I had a great time volunteering at and attending PLDI 2016.  The volunteering responsibilities allowed me to help make the conference run more smoothly and did not detract from the event at all – the duties mostly required attending talks that I wanted to attend.  This PLDI was at a great location and had many good papers and presentations.  I'm looking forward to watching the recordings for the sessions where two sessions that I wanted to attend were concurrent.

My favorite sessions were PLMW, Energy & Performance, and the two Down to the Metal sessions.  Specifically, I thought Programming with Estimates by James Bornholt and GreenWeb: Language Extensions for Energy-Efficient Mobile Web Computing by Yuhao Zhu were particularly well-delivered talks.  In addition to the great banquet, all of the lunches and breakfasts were good and I met many researchers that I had not run into to before.  Thank you to all of the presenters, attendees, and other volunteers for making PLDI 2016 successful!

Back from PLDI 2016

PLDI 2016 ended several days ago. It is my honor to attend the premier conference on programming language as a student volunteer. It is also my honor to get financial support from ACM SIGPLAN PAC. 

Thanks to the conference committee who decided to hold the conference in the beautiful city, Santa Barbara. The weather is mild and comfortable. The conference hotel is near the beach and the scenery is charming. Thanks to Dan and Michael, who arranged the jobs for volunteers carefully so that we, student volunteers, had enough time to listen to reports and meet with experts. 

Because I am interested in program verification, I attended the SOAP workshop and the program verification sessions. The work reported there is great and it is worthwhile to learn from the papers and the reporters. It is a nice experience to attend PLDI, but I think it would be better if I had a paper there. I will work harder. See you PLDI 2017 when I hope that I can meet with you with my own paper.

Post-PLDI 2016

I had a great time at PLDI, my first conference. Not only were the talks interesting, but we got to enjoy the sun, the beach, and the mountain views (Waterloo, Ontario is very flat). I also enjoyed chatting with the people I'd randomly bump into.

I attended PLMW, and found all the talks (keynotes, technical talks, and professional development) to be very valuable. I would definitely recommend PLMW to all early grad students, as well as senior undergrads considering graduate school.

And then there was the main PLDI conference. My only "complaint" is that there were so many interesting talks and I was so tired that everything blurred together! So I'm looking forward to when the recordings are posted, so I can take another look and also read some of the papers.

Thank you to everybody who was involved in making this a great event!

Landing back in Canada from PLDI

I'm back in the (surprisingly warmer, too warm) climate of Canada. I had a great time at PLDI this year. The location was fantastic, the talks were interesting, and the people were great. Both keynotes were exceptional and really motivating. I'd like to thank all the organizers and volunteers that made this conference run as smoothly as it did.

The SRC was a really good opportunity to get some great feedback. I'm very appreciative for being able to do this. It appears we're on the right track, and there's some excitement towards our research, which is great.

I really enjoyed all of the low-level x86 talks. It's pretty surprising as to what still can be done by looking at assembly. The "Programmatic and Direct Manipulation, Together at Last" talk was very interesting as well. I really like the presentation style.

I also have a (customary, apparently) sunburn to remember the trip. Hope to see everyone at the next one!

Back from PLDI'16

ISMM and PLDI have just ended. It was an awesome experience for me to learn from and know about other attendees. I much enjoyed chatting with the researchers in the compiler field. Not only the knowledge they share, -- most importantly--, but also the way doing research they told me really attract me. The paper I like most is the best paper from ISMM, which provides a sound way to optimize cache performance by combining hardware and software. Also, the talk was also fantastic. I wish next year I can present a paper in PLDI'17. By the way, the outdoor lunch was extremely enjoyable!

Back from PLDI

I had a great week in Santa Barbara for PLDI 2016!

As I wrote previously, I hoped to have a chance to chat with some other students, and this was definitely the case -- I met some really cool people.

I felt like my talk went fairly well, although sadly the SDN session was not as well-attended as I had hoped. In any case, I got to hear about some other cool SDN projects.

I also had a chance to do some hiking in the mountains above Santa Barbara, which was very fun.

Hopefully I'll have a chance to attend PLDI next year!

jed

Post-PLDI

This is the first academic conference I attended, and it was an awesome experience that's way beyond my expectations. I did not expect to meet so many friendly people, all willing to tell me their experiences, share similarities, give me suggestions and encouragements. The PLMW workshop, which was why I got interested in attending PLDI, was also very useful and fun--especially the mentoring session in the noon. Thanks to NSF funding and my roommates, they made this trip possible and affordable. The conference organizers did a great job, and the student volunteer chairs were extremely nice and helpful.

I listened to many interesting talks and met some truly inspiring people. The poster session is especially fun for me, particularly because I can ask as many questions as I want almost one-on-one with the presenter. It's like I attended an intense 5-day workshop which is also incredibly fun, and walked away with a lot of knowledge and ideas. I'm definitely looking forward to attend more future conferences, and meeting friends old and new there.

Looking forward to the recorded videos for talks on YouTube. :)

A Successful PLDI

I'm back in Massachusetts from my first PLDI, and it was great!

A lot of people invested their time into making this a fantastic event, and I specifically wanted to thank:

• The Program Chair Emery Berger and General Chair Chandra Krintz for a fantastic set of keynotes and accepted papers.
• Annabel Satin from the ACM for all of her logistical work making sure people had places to stay and generally keeping the conference on the rails!
• Student Volunteer chairs Michael Christensen and Dan Barowy for wrangling all of us volunteers.

I wrote up some more thoughts on my blog here.  I'm very glad and grateful to have attended PLDI 2016, and I hope to see people next year in Barcelona!

Home From PLDI

This was my first time attending PLDI and my first time volunteering.  Volunteering was fun.  I had the opportunity to assist during PLMW and to check tickets at the banquet.

I enjoyed PDLI, especially PLMW and the synthesis talks.  I think synthesis is a funny problem where we want end-users to produce programs without knowing how to program.  I expect that, at least, these efforts can help programmers save time in writing code.  Everyone at PLDI is working on interesting problems.  I look forward to attending PLDI next year and see many of you again!

Another Successful PLDI!

After nearly a week in beautiful Santa Barbara, PLDI is over. The location could not have been more perfect: the weather was spectacular, the wine was delicious, and the Santa Barbara community was warm and receptive to the hundreds of researchers descending upon their town.

Hats off to the following people for making PLDI a great success:

• general chair Chandra Krintz for choosing such a wonderful location and handling many of the logistics of a conference this size
• ACM's Annabel Satin for communicating with hotel staff when issues arose, and for her innumerable other duties. If there's a problem at PLDI, you'll see her somewhere in the periphery dealing with it!
• Student volunteer co-chairs Dan Barowy and Michael Christensen for wrangling all of us student volunteers and using efficient communication channels
• PC chair Emery Berger (and the rest of the PC!) for putting together an excellent program

This year, PLDI had two very interesting keynotes from Ben Zorn and Luiz Barroso that urged our community to look at a variety of interesting problems that could use language-based solutions. Ben's keynote concerned a variety of topics, from handling bugs in the data programs operate on to privacy issues in the Internet of Things, and spawned a number of conference jokes involving malevolent smart forks. Luiz's talk described unique performance challenges involved in warehouse-scale computing, where it is most important to reduce tail latencies. I found a summary of an older version of his talk online.

I attended many research presentations, including all of those mentioned in my pre-PLDI post, and enjoyed the breadth and depth of the program. Since all talks were recorded this year, I can go back and review presentations that I did not quite grasp and watch presentations that I missed! I hope the talks are uploaded soon.

Next year, PLDI will be in Barcelona. I definitely plan to attend!

Post-PLDI 2016

This year's PLDI was the first time that I attended a large conference on programming languages. I listened to many interesting presentations at the main conference, and especially at the ARRAY workshop. But much more important than the technical knowledge and feedback that I gained at the conference, were the people that I met at PLDI. Most of them are working on different research topics; but as it turned out, some of them are working on very similar topics and there may be a chance that we collaborate in some way in the future.

I think that at PLDI I gained a lot of inspiration for my own research and made many friends, whom I will hopefully and probably meet again at future conferences and maybe at next year's PLDI! I would also like to thank the organizers who did a very good job, selected a beautiful location, and put together an awesome program for all students who attended PLDI.

Reflections on PLDI

My original reason for attending the conference was to meet with Fabrice Rastello to discuss our upcoming project on performance debugging and auto-tuning. While he is of course very busy at this kind of venue (and everywhere else, I think!) we did manage to find an hour for a focused discussion about the state of current work on the project, and the basic components to be added during my internship. Our project relies substantially on finding and/or creating a flexible emulation platform that supports custom ISA definitions along with stable execution of concurrent programs. Our top candidates are gem5 and QEMU, though both suffer from chronic disorder in the codebase, and neither offers all the functionality we need. While it would be ideal to apply some of the fancy tools that were presented this week at PLDI, such as Heule's work on automatically learning the x86-64 instruction set, we may be stuck manually implementing a lot of instructions in one of these messy emulators.

Since my advisor Brian Demsky and I have recently submitted a security paper to CCS, we thought it would be advantageous to enter the same work in the PLDI student research competition. This turned out to be a bit of a squeeze, since our CCS submission was a bit early to begin with (one benchmark missing, for example), and we had not thought much about presenting the ideas in short form. But the effort paid off--several people offered interesting feedback about our tool during the poster session, which led to a few important additions to my presentation for the second round. I've asked the judges for their feedback as well, though I think the competition has been more than enough extra work for them already :-)

One thing I always enjoy at conferences is talking with people who I rarely see anywhere else. This week I caught up with Matt Brown from UCLA, who is continuing his work on self-typed and self-optimizing interpreters in lambda calculus. He also told me about an interesting project at Viewpoints Research where he did an internship recently--combining copy-on-write immutable semantics with traditional programming language features to make that paradigm more widely accessible. Kirshanthan Sundararajah from Purdue is working on a cache locality optimization for dual tree traversals--i.e., traversing the same tree twice simultaneously, for example as nested subtrees. This technique automatically inverts the traversal at the point where the inner subtree becomes fully cache bound. He claims the optimization can be done entirely at compile time, based on static analysis, though I'm waiting to see the paper!

Of course I enjoyed discussing research with the other student contestants as well, though you can read about their work in the official abstracts. Three of the finalists had techniques that I may be able to use in various aspects of my security work. It was especially convenient that my poster was placed in between two of them, so I had plenty of opportunities to discuss the details.

Papers and Presentations

PLDI

There were 10 papers that I found especially interesting and relevant to my current and recent work, or that I believe are especially important for the future of programming language research. The presentations were mostly disappointing--in most cases I was able to learn more about the technique from less than one page of the paper than from the entire 30 minute talk. It makes me wonder if there should be a separate acceptance phase for presentations, such that some accepted papers would not be presented during the conference sessions. This would free up significant time for other activities which might be more beneficial for the attendees anyway.

1. End-to-end verification of information-flow security for C and assembly programs 
• Verification of low-level implementations is miserably technical, yet is handled in an elegant manner by Costanzo et al., and was also presented in a very clear and understandable way.
2. On the complexity and performance of parsing with derivatives 
• This paper stands out for me only because the talk was excellent--despite the speaker's distracting habit of getting stuck on a phrase and taking several attempts to finally say all the words.
3. A design and verification methodology for secure isolated regions 
• Isolated regions provide great security benefits, but only up to the limits of our verification techniques. While I'm no expert on the subject, this seemed like an excellent improvement over existing approaches. 
• My only complaint about the presentation is that the author completely neglected to introduce the Intel SGX instruction set, or explain anything about secure isolated regions. 
4. Transactional data structure libraries
• Transactional software components are one of my favorite topics, and I believe the efficiency of software development in large, business-critical applications will come to depend more and more on them. 
• The presentation covered all the main points, but was a bit confusing on just about every aspect. Several members of the audience asked basic questions like, "xyz... what exactly is that?"
5. Data-driven precondition inference with learned features
• Learning preconditions is a fundamental step towards many aspects of reliable computing. This technique significantly reduces the manual effort required to establish accurate preconditions.
• However, the presentation was not useful at all. The time would have been much better spent reading the paper.
• The basic problem was never established: i.e., that inference operates on a fixed set of atomic predicates which must be manually specified or derived from somewhere.
• Focused mainly on the PIE workflow, rather than explaining how it infers the aforementioned set of atomic predicates.
• The transition to the subtopic of inferring loop invariants was totally abrupt, entirely lacking any attempt to relate the two applications of the inference technique.
6. Input responsiveness: using canary inputs to dynamically steer approximation
• Sophisticated tools often miss opportunities to greatly improve their performance by taking a few simple, intuitive steps to learn things that a concrete analysis couldn't resolve in years of runtime. This approach is a great example.
• The talk really needs to focus on a basic example, showing exactly what kind of approximations are tolerated by the conventional approach, and how the irrelevant options are pruned by the canary tests.
7. Stratified synthesis: automatically learning the x86-64 instruction set
• Everyone knows the details of hardware instructions (or lack thereof) are a constant source of trouble in low-level implementation. After just a few weeks working with DynamoRIO, I found a bug in the encoding of a multimedia instruction that had not been encountered despite years of regular use in dozens of research projects. This technique could be a game changer for all kinds of bare metal tools.
• The presentation never bothered to introduce the most basic aspects of the technique. It dove directly into comparisons of various things, and salient details about something or other, but never explained how the thing actually works. The first paragraph of section 3.1 is far more useful than this entire 30-minute talk.
8. Fast synthesis of fast collections
• Well what more could you want from a synthesis tool? But the presentation didn't give me an idea of its capabilities, and the paper seems to relate everything in terms of prior work, which is never adequately summarized. 
• The basic mechanics of the tool were also completely elided from the talk. Reading one page of the introduction (paragraphs 3 through the end) filled in the blanks for me in less than 2 minutes.
9. Just-in-time static type checking for dynamic languages
• Definitely a must-have for any type-sloppy language. I can't critique the talk because I missed it :-)
10. FlexVec: auto-vectorization for irregular loops
• An interesting approach to improving vectorization in a cost-effective way, but I'll have to read the paper to say anything more about it (missed the talk). 

ISMM

I was only able to attend half a day of ISMM, and while I found all the topics interesting, many of the presentations were missing the key points. My favorite paper is Liveness-based garbage collection for lazy languages, not because I thought it was the most important idea, but because it was the only one I could reasonably understand without reading the paper! I'll read the others later--but as for promoting their work at the conference, those authors certainly missed their chance with me.

LCTES

The talks in the "Worst-Case Analysis and Error Handling" session were all very interesting, but none provided significant information beyond the published abstract. Fortunately I brought my laptop and was able to use the time to make slides for my presentation.

Venue

The Fess Parker hotel was luxurious, and the meals and coffee breaks were well supplied with excellent fare. Here in Orange County, most of the beach-front property is private, so it was especially nice to enjoy waterfront views from the lunch table. However, I was slightly annoyed that the hotel room rates were totally unaffordable, even for a shared a room. Parking was $19 per day, making it unreasonable to drive from another location as well. It turned out ok though--I found an airbnb up on one of the hills and packed my trusty road bike to facilitate the commute. Santa Barbara is a nice town to bike in, once you know the pleasant way across the freeway and some efficient routes through town. It was also relieving to get away from the sterile confines of the hotel in the evenings and enjoy the more organic setting of a neighborhood full of trees, birds, fresh breezes, and the inimitable tones of wild coyotes.

Another PLDI

PLDi has ended and it was another good experience for me. I enjoyed a lot of good talks and chats, especially during the poster presentation.
The organization of this year PLDI is awesome! Can't complaint of such a location with the beach right in front of the conference hotel. I love the outdoor lunch/reception! I just wish that there are some more social activities/sightseeing but regardless, the conference was good!

Do we know when will the talk recordings will be released?

Post-PLDI

Hi,

PLDI is just over for me. It was my first conference ever and I am happy to have met such wonderful people. The talks were interesting, especially Jean's "Precise, Dynamic Information Flow for Database-Backed Applications".

The SOAP workshop was particularly interesting to me, along with the SRC. That was a good first experience for presenting posters and giving presentations. All participants had very interesting topics to talk about. I was impressed by Byron Hawkins' work in particular.

I'm looking forward to Barcelona next year!

Cheers,

Lisa

Pre PLDI

I've just finished my junior year at UW and I'm here at PLDI (my first academic conference!) to present my work on verifying Chord at the Student Research Competition. I'm looking forward to seeing what other students are up to and learning more about what it means to work in academia. As an undergraduate, I think I have vague ideas about what life in graduate school and beyond looks like, and this trip will hopefully demystify some of that.

I'm looking forward to attending some talks and especially looking forward to the poster session. I'm curious to see what other students in the SRC are working on.

Pre-PLDI 2016

Hi everyone,

I am an undergraduate at the University of Washington working with Eric Mullen, Zach Tatlock and Dan Grossman on verifying peephole optimizations for CompCert (see Eric's talk "Verified Peephole Optimizations for CompCert" on Thursday.) I started dabbling with PL in 2009 when I was a high school intern at MSR's RiSE group. I then worked in industry for a few years and spent some time traveling abroad. Now, I'm finishing my undergrad, this summer I'm back at RiSE working with Tom Ball, and I'll be applying to grad schools for PL this fall!

- Daryl Z.

Pre-PLDI

I'm Pratiksha, a first-year Ph.D. student at Stanford working with Alex Aiken. I'm interested in ways that randomness can be useful in building practical systems. Most recently, I've been studying applications of randomized algorithms and machine learning to program synthesis.

This is my first time at PLDI, and will be an opportunity to learn about a field that's new to me. I look forward to hearing about the diverse array of work happening in PL!

See you in PLDI'16!

Hi, I am Pengcheng Li, a fourth-year PhD student from the University of Rochester. I am working with Professor Chen Ding on memory allocators, in-memory caches and related timescale theory. Our ongoing memory demand theory will be presented in ISMM'16. Our timescale theory, as proved, affirms to be a generalized theory including the past HOTL locality theory and other conversional theories. I feel excited to share our new, recent work with you to earn comments and suggestions. This is the third time to attend PLDI. Every time, I see my research buddies, share one another's latest work and absorb feedback from them. PLDI is a great forum to drive the most cutting-edge technology on program languages. Researchers like me appreciate this form of discussion. Hope to see you in my ISMM'16 talk and PLDI main conference. Any feedback will be appreciated!

Looking Forward to the Next Few Days

Hello all! My name is Eric Atkinson, and I am a first year graduate student at MIT being advised my Michael Carbin. My current research is on analyzing probabilistic programs, but I am also interested in approximate computing, program analysis through machine learning, and in general the intersection of PL technologies with uncertain reasoning. This is my third PLDI visit, and I hope to use it to meet other people who are also interested in this area. I am particularly looking forward to the talks on "Input Responsiveness", "Data-Driven Precondition Inference", and "Statistical Similarity of Binaries". I also hope to be able to catch some of the SRC talks to see what other students are working on.  I would like to thank the organizers for their generous funding, and I hope to see everyone in Santa Barbara!

Landing at PLDI

Hello world! I'm Jon Eyolfson, travelling today from Waterloo, ON, Canada. I'm a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Waterloo. I just landed in Santa Barbara, and am excited for a week in such a nice place filled with interesting people and talks. My current research interests are dynamic and static analysis for C/C++ programs. Specifically, I'm exploring immutability properties. I'm especially interested in the "Down to the Metal" themed talks as well. I'm grateful for having a chance to embrace the SRC, and hope to see you all soon.

Jianqiao Liu: Excited for PLDI 2016

Hello, all! I’m Jianqiao Liu, a third year phd student from Purdue University. I work with Professor Milind Kulkarni on Automatically optimization for irregular application on heterogenous system. This is my second PLDI experience. Last year, I attended many interesting talks and met several interesting people. And I have the same expectation for this time. I have special interest on the “Latte” paper, which is mainly about new programming language for deep neural network. I also have a poster in SRC session about hybrid cpu-gpu scheduling and execution for tree traversals. If you’re interested in this aspect, please feel free to talk with me / come to my presentation.

Looking forward to PLDI

Hi all, my name is Byron Hawkins and I'm a 4th year PhD student of Brian Demsky at the University of California, Irvine. I'm on my way to the conference this morning, starting with the second day of LCTES which is colocated with PLDI. My research focuses on security and compiler/runtime optimization, so I'm interested in the embedded platforms because the resource constraints in that environment are similar to high-performance security tools. While our target platforms have typical server CPU and memory architectures, our tools must minimize interference with the performance of the target application. The other half of my research on compiler and runtime optimization often encounters memory handling constraints, so I'm also interested in the ISMM topics and will attend some of those talks in the afternoon.

The main reason I'm attending the conference is to present my most recent security tool called ShrinkWrap in the PLDI Student Research Competition. We submitted a paper about this tool for the first time a few weeks ago, and now we are taking this opportunity to get feedback from the community about our approach. ShrinkWrap focuses on weaknesses in the PHP language, and it applies constraints to the protected program at the level of the interpreter IR. Since the PLDI community specializes in these elements of the software development infrastructure, we're looking forward to any observations and insights may share with us.

 Another reason I'm attending PLDI is to meet with Fabrice Rastello, who leads the compiler and optimization group at Inria. Next year I'll be traveling to Grenoble for a 6-month internship with Fabrice and one of his new PhD students. We'll be exploring an automated approach to dynamic profiling for compiler optimization. Current profiling techniques require significant manual effort to select the scope of profiling and implement the specific introspection mechanism. To increase accuracy, we plan to integrate feedback-guided search into the profiler, making it possible to automatically explore a much larger set of introspection points in the target program.

Thanks to the ACM and the sponsors of the PLDI SRC providing funding that makes it possible for me to attend the conference this week.

PLDI 2016 Just Arrived!

Hello all! My name is Karl and I am going into the second year of my PhD program at Tufts having just completed the Masters. I look forward to the many talks at PLDI, and hope to meet students and researchers with similar research interests.

Excited to attend PLDI 2016

Hi all! My name is Adarsh Yoga. I am PhD student at Rutgers University working in the RAPL group with Santosh Nagarakatte. This is my second time attending PLDI and after having a great experience last year, I am very excited to attend this year. There are quite a few talks this year that I want to attend. I am especially interested in attending the two Parallelism sessions and the talk on fixing cache contention issues. I am participating in the Student Research Competition and look forward to talking to a lot of people about my research at the Poster session.

Going to PLDI

Hi everyone, I'm Kyle Headley, a first year PhD student from CUPLV working with Matthew Hammer. This will be my first time at PLDI, though I've been trying to present as much work at conferences as possible. This time, I'll be participating in the Student Research Competition with an entry about a new data structure called the Random Access Zipper (RAZ).

More generally, I've been working with incremental computation, looking for ways to trade memory for more speed of computations. My website contains some work along these lines, as well as side projects that have come out of it, like the RAZ I'll be presenting to the folks at PLDI. I've been very fortunate to be able to do this work, and I'd like to thank the people organizing the SRC for travel support.

PLDI 2016 - Before

My name is Rian Shambaugh and I just finished the first year of my PhD at UMass Amherst.  I work with Arjun Guha and our paper will be presented on Thursday.  This first PLDI, first time volunteering, and first publication.  I'm looking forward to meeting new people this week in sunny Santa Barbara!

Pre-PLDI

Hello everyone, I am Abdulbaki Aydin, a Ph.D. candidate at University of California, Santa Barbara where I am being advised by Prof. Tevfik Bultan. My research focuses on string analysis for modern software application and we will have a tutorial about string analysis in this PLDI (on Monday, at 1.30pm). This is my first PLDI and first time volunteering. PLDI will be a great opportunity for me to meet excellent researchers from PL community.  I am looking forward to meeting you all.

Welcome to beautiful Santa Barbara!
-baki

PLDI 2016, Let's Go!

My name is Daniel DeFreez, and I am a third-year PhD student at UC Davis, advised by Cindy Rubio-González. This is my second PLDI, but my first time volunteering.

My own research revolves around automatically inferring specifications for systems software. I am particularly interested in how program analysis techniques can be used to find defective error-handling behavior in complex systems such as Linux. But really, I just like building tools that break things.

I am impressed by this group of volunteers, and I look forward to meeting you all. See you soon!

Pre-PLDI

Hi everyone, I'm Mehmet Emre, a first-year PhD student in Ben Hardekopf's Programming Languages Lab at UC Santa Barbara. This will be my first PLDI and first big PL conference so I am excited to meet with the PL community. Also, there are so many interesting talks that I want to attend and discuss with other people in the field. Hopefully, PLDI will help broaden my horizon, catch up with what's going on in programming language research nowadays, network with other researchers and find interesting research topics.

See you all in Santa Barbara!

- Mehmet

Pre PLDI 2016

Dear all,

I am Pierre Wilke, a PhD student at the University of Rennes, France. My thesis concerns certified compilation of low-level C programs. I am very excited to present a poster about this research at the Poster Session of the Student Research Competition on Wednesday afternoon.

I am looking forward to hearing PLDI talks, as well as attending colocated workshops: FMS and PLMW.

See you soon!

Pierre

Looking forward to PLDI 2016!

Hi everyone! My name is Jedidiah ("Jed") McClurg, and I'm a Ph.D. student finishing up my third year in the CUPLV group at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This will be my second PLDI experience. Last year, I presented "Efficient Synthesis of Network Updates" at PLDI 2015 in Portland. I'm really excited to have an opportunity to attend PLDI 2016 again, and present my follow-on work, "Event-Driven Network Programming". I'm especially excited to visit Santa Barbara, one of my favorite places in the USA.

Judging by the blog entries so far, it looks like there will be many other students attending. I hope to meet some of you at the conference!

Regards,
jed

P.S. thanks to SIGPLAN PAC for providing a small portion of the funding needed to attend the conference.

Nevena Golubovic, Pre-PLDI'16

Hi Everyone,

My name is Nevena Golubovic and I am a third year PhD student at UCSB working with Prof. Chandra Krintz and Prof. Rich Wolski. My interests are in Cloud Computing,  Sensor Networks and IoT. I learned about volunteering opportunities at PLDI and I am happy to participate. I am excited to learn from great talks, workshops and poster sessions and I look forward to meeting people.

See you all very soon!

PLDI happening soon

Being a volunteer in PLDI is going to be a very exciting experience. I'll get to know how such a large conference is organized, attend the workshops, talks and poster sessions, and talk to people who potentially have a very similar career interest with me. I heard about this conference from a professor's email about the co-hosted workshop PLMW, but eventually grew interest with the whole PLDI.
I hope to meet a lot of interesting people and hear about their career, how they're pursuing it and beyond. I want to learn about all the different things that are happening in PL and what it is like to be a researcher in PL, or anything else interesting in this area. It's going to be a lot of fun =)

John Vilk: Excited for PLDI 2016!

Hey there! I'm John Vilk, a PhD student in the PLASMA lab at UMass Amherst. My advisor is Emery Berger. This will be my second time attending PLDI; at PLDI 2014, I presented my work on bringing conventional languages to the web browser on top of JavaScript. My research aims to make the web platform a sane place for ordinary developers.

I look forward to seeing the few PLDI papers that are directly relevant to browser technologies. There are talks on extending the browser for energy-efficient mobile computing and adding refinement types to TypeScript. There is also an interesting paper that synthesizes updates to programs that generate SVG diagrams in response to a developer using their mouse to directly manipulate the graphic like in a vector graphics editor; the updated program generates the updated SVG.

Between interesting talks like those, I am excited to see a number of familiar and new faces from the community in the hallway, and hear about all of the interesting problems they are tackling. I am sure to return from PLDI with a long list of interesting papers to read!

Friends and Collaborators for Life!

As graduate students, it's easy to for us to get tunnel vision and focus only on research, meeting academic milestones, or publishing. Attending a conference is a great way to get a sense of the kinds of problems people in a field find interesting, to make research connections, and practice pitching ideas. It's also a great way to meet friends who become collaborators and collaborators who become friends.

This is my third PLDI. I had a great time participating in SRC at my first PLDI in Edinborough in 2014, and co-captaining volunteers during my second PLDI in 2015. This year I'm hoping to get a little more time to attend talks, meet other students, chat with new faculty members, and come back inspired by all the great work being done in the PLDI community! I'm especially proud and honored to be part of the PLASMA lab at UMass, under the supervision of Emery Berger, who is the program chair for this year's PLDI.

PLDI2016 Pre

Hi everyone , I am Laith Sakka a first year Phd Student at Purdue University , I am a member of programming languages and compliers research group working under the supervision of Prof.Milind Kulkarni . 

This is the first PLDI conference that i attend ,and i am very excited .
I am sure that i will benefit a lot from the workshops and talks  I am looking forward to meet you all ] soon .

Pre-PLDI 2016

Hi everyone! My name is Ming-Ho Yee and I'm currently finishing my master's at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Canada. This fall, I'll be starting my PhD at Northeastern University, in Boston, USA. I'm also a co-author of a PLDI paper.

I'm really excited about PLDI. Not only will this be my first PLDI, but it is also my first conference as a graduate student! So I'm looking forward to attending all these great talks and meeting all sorts of different people in the research community. It will also be a good opportunity to explore potential topics for my PhD.

See you soon!

Ben Campbell, Pre PLDI

Hello Everyone!

My name is Ben Campbell. I am a third year Computer Science Undergraduate at UCSB, so it shouldn't be a surprise that this is my first PLDI. I was actually clued into this opportunity from being a member of the Programming Languages lab at UCSB where I am accruing the base of knowledge needed to engage in advanced studies. Still so much to do.

From what I can tell right now, I gravitate towards logics and computability theory rather than algorithmic studies. In particular, the interaction of language and formal semantics fascinates me. That being said, I've only scratched this vast field's surface, and I know this upcoming conference is going to help immensely in finding out what all is out there.

It'll be great to meet you all next week. Seeya then.

-Ben

Gavrilov Miroslav, pre-PLDI'16

Hello everyone!

My name is Miroslav Gavrilov, and I'm a first-year graduate student of Tevfik Bultan's at the Verification Lab at UCSB. This is my first PLDI, in both the role of a volunteer and participant, and there are too many talks I am excited to hear and talk about. I am looking forward to the networking opportunity with so many great people in the field!

See you all in a couple of days!

- Miroslav

Before PLDI 2016

Hi Everyone!

I’m Nour, a Ph.D student at Purdue’s ECE. I work with prof. Milind Kulkarni.

I just skimmed through some of the posts on this blog, and it look like I will be volunteering with a really smart group of people :) . This is my first PLDI conference and I’m sure I will be learning a lot since it’s one of the leading conferences in the field. 

My research interests are in the area of Big Data. I’m particularly interested in stream processing and non-persistent data.

Looking forward to meet you all!

-Nour

PLDI-Intro

Hi everyone! I'm Tegan Brennan, a second year PhD student in Tevfik Bultan's Verification Lab at UC Santa Barbara. This will be my first time attending PLDI and I'm incredibly excited for the chance to meet so many researchers in the field and hear them present their work. I've spent a lot of enjoyable time the last few days going through the schedule online and trying to pick which talks to attend (which can be hard when there are so many interesting ones)!

I'm very grateful for the opportunity to volunteer and attend PLDI this year and I'm looking forward to meeting you all soon. See you in Santa Barbara!

UC Davis at PLDI

Hello, everyone!  My name is Martin Velez.  I am a Ph.D. student at UC Davis.  My advisor is Prof. Zhendong Su.  I volunteered to help at PLDI because I want to help this community and soon start contributing my own research ideas and work.  

As part of my research, I am developing a new online cloud development environment (http://cumulus.cs.ucdavis.edu).  My aim is to incorporate some new ideas in code completion and visualization.  I hope to make programming easier, especially for beginners.

I look forward to meeting all of you!

PLDI 2016 approaches...

Good morning! I'm Ziv Scully, a just-recently-graduated senior at MIT beginning a PhD at Carnegie Mellon this coming fall. I've been working under the mentorship of Prof. Adam Chlipala on automatically adding caching, including any necessary cache invalidation, to web applications written in Ur/Web. I'm excited to be presenting this work at the Student Research Competition of my first PLDI! I'm also looking forward to getting a taste of a broad variety of areas in programming language research. See you at PLDI!

Pre-PLDI 2016

Hi everyone!

I am Lisa Nguyen Quang Do, a PhD student of Prof. Eric Bodden, at Paderborn University. I am researching static analysis, and will attend PLDI for the first time this year.

I'll give a talk at SOAP on automated benchmark management, and also present my research on user-centric static analysis at the SRC. I am looking forward to receive your feedback and discuss things with you.

Hope to see you there!

Cheers,

Lisa

On the road to PLDI

Hello everyone out there,


My name is Duco and I will be part of the student volunteers helping out at PLDI '16. I am very happy to be able to make this small contribution to the success of this year's conference as I love to organize and help organize all sorts of events.

I'm still a Ph.D student working with the Inria research institute in Grenoble, France. However my defense will take in place in little more then a month after PLDI so I'm definitely looking forward to meet researchers and establish some contacts while searching for a post-doc position.

I'm both co-author of a paper at LCTES on Monday on the topic of cache optimization for dataflow programs and presenter of a poster during the PLDI reception on the subject of performance debugging of data locality and memory accesses.


Hope to see you all soon in Santa Barbara!

Pre-PLDI 2016

Hi everyone, I am Bingbin Liu (Clara), an undergraduate student in Professor Hardekopf's programming language lab at UCSB. This will be my first PLDI and I feel lucky that this year it is hosted in Santa Barbara~ I haven't decided on my area of focus, so I hope I could get a better idea about different research topics through the talks. I am really excited about some of the workshops and meeting people from the PL community too. This would also be my first time as a student volunteer; I am probably going to video record some of you :)

Looking forward to meeting you all in a few days!

Cheers,
Clara

Pre-PLDI

Hi all,

I am Kihong Heo from Seoul National University, Korea. I am a Ph. D student supervised by Prof. Kwangkeun Yi and studying static analysis. I am so excited to have a chance to present my research "Efficient Global Octagon Analysis in the Big Data Era" in the poster session. My main research topic is to achieve precise yet scalable static analysis using abstract interpretation and machine learning. So, I hope to share my research and discuss it with other students also. 

I am looking forward to meeting you next week.

- Kihong 

PLDI-Intro

Hi, I'm Lawton Nichols, and I'm a second-year PhD student in Ben Hardekopf's Programming Languages Lab at UC Santa Barbara—it's going to be a lengthy 20-minute drive to the conference for me. This will be my first PLDI, so I'm extra excited for the talks: the top three papers that interest me the most are Refinement Types for TypeScript, Program Synthesis from Polymorphic Refinement Types, and Polymorphic Type Inference for Machine Code—I was very happy to discover that none of the presentation times are going to clash. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll be able to temporarily disable my shyness and ask one of the authors an intelligent question!

I'm looking forward to meeting my fellow volunteers and all the students attending PLMW. See you all in a few days!

Pre-PLDI 2016

Hi all, 

I am Gang Fan a PhD student of Prof. Charles Zhang at HKUST. This will be my first time attending PLDI and my second time being a volunteer (The first is FSE HK). I am really looking forward to meet some great researchers and students.  

This time I will present an SRC paper "Snagle: A lightweight sparse conditional null pointer and unreachable code analysis", which is a part of a bigger program verification project. 

I will also attend the SOSP workshop in which one of my group mates will present another part of this project.    

Many many thanks for offering me this opportunity. 

See you all there~

Gang

Pre-PLDI 2016

Hi everyone, I'm Parker Hill from University of Michigan.  I'm a 2nd year PhD student working with with Professors Jason Mars and Lingjia Tang in Clarity Lab.  My research interests are where computer architecture intersects programming languages and compilers.  Because of this, I am most excited about the papers in the "Down to the Metal" and "Energy & Performance" sessions.

I have only attended conferences focused on computer architecture, previously (ISCA/ASPLOS), so it will be interesting to experience the difference in how PL/compiler research is done when it is the central focus.  It will also be great to meet new researchers with common interests.  Only a few days until PLDI now!

Pre-PLDI 2016

Hello, I am Sungkeun Cho, a PhD student of Kwangkeun Yi at Seoul National University, Korea. This is my first PLDI, so I am very excited to see the greatest works in the programming language area. In the SRC poster session, I will present an automatic generation system of static analyzers. I think it would be helpful to get various comments from you. Please come and share your ideas with me, especially if you are interested in static analysis and its formal verification. I hope to see you there.

Pre-PLDI 2016

Hi all,

I'm Khanh Nguyen, from UC Irvine. This will be my second PLDI. It's good to have a conference that is so close to my home :)
This time also I will participate in the SRC. I will present a hybrid GC for Big Data systems. I hope to see a lot of you there in the poster session.
I also look forward to listening to the talks. There are some papers that I'm really interested in but unfortunately they occur at the same time, so now I need to decide which one to attend.

Khanh Nguyen

Pre-PLDI

Hello everyone, I'm Kyle Dewey, a fifth year PhD student of Ben Hardekopf at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  My research area encompasses automated test input generation via constraint logic programming, for the purposes of automatically finding bugs.  This will be my third PLDI.  PLDI has always offered some great networking opportunities, and I'm looking forward to this.  I'm planning to graduate around this time next year, so I'm hoping to do a little job searching while I'm there.  I'm particularly interested in academic positions with a teaching focus.

Welcome to Santa Barbara!
-Kyle

Looking forward to PLDI 2016!

Hi!  I'm Bobby Powers, a second year PhD student of Emery Berger in the Programming Languages and Systems (PLASMA) Lab at UMass Amherst.  My research interests include systems and PL.  Recently I've become interested inhow formal methods can be used (and exposed by programming languages) to increase the robustness of systems while keeping software simple and readable.  I'm excited for Jean Yang's "Precise, dynamic information flow for database-backed applications", David Costanzo's "End-to-end verification of information-flow security for C and assembly programs", and Panagiotis Vekris's "Refinement types for TypeScript" talks.  In addition, I'm generally looking forward to meeting and connecting with other researchers interested in programming language design and implementation!

This is my first time volunteering (or attending) PLDI, and I'm especially looking forward to attending the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop.

See y'all there!

PLDI16, here I come!

I'm Sepideh Maleki. I just graduated from Texas State University with my master's and will start my PhD this fall at UT Austin.
I'm waiting for this event since January when I found out my paper got accepted. PLDI is the best conference in programming languages and I'm so excited to be part of it this year. What excites me more is to meet all these experts in my field and I can't wait to hear about everyone's research. This is my first time serving as a student volunteer at a conference and I know it will be a great experience.
My research interest is all about parallel programming so I would like to hear more about parallelism, energy and performance. I'm looking forward to meet Ben Zorn because well who doesn't! I'm hoping to meet Jean Yang too. I've been following her blog for a while now and I'm excited to meet her at PLMW.

See y'all at Santa Barbara :-)

Pre PLDI 2016

I'm Keith Chapman, a PhD student in the Computer Science department at Purdue University,
who plans to graduate this December :). I'm advised by Prof Antony Hosking, I also collaborate with prof Eliot Moss from the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMASS. My research interest focus on programing languages, compilers and transactional memory. PLDI offers a perfect platform for meeting fellow researches in these fields.

This is my second time volunteering for PLDI and I look forward to meeting you in Santa Barbara.

Mike Shah - Introduction

Hi my name is Mike Shah, I am hoping this year to have a great time at PLDI. I will be presenting during the SOAP workshop for the first time, and I am excited to hear freed back from other top researchers in that field. I have previously attended PLDI two times, and I always hear lots of interesting talks. I think attending talks on systems, concurrency, and other topics will encourage me to read the full papers after the talks. This is something I look forward to whenever I come back from PLDI. While attending PLDI, I hope to network with other researchers in the field of concurrency. I am going to be starting to write my dissertation and graduate in about a years time. If there are opportunities to connect with individuals for jobs, post-doc, or faculty positions, I am hoping I can find a place I can add value to when I graduate! It is an important part to also network with other graduate students and undergraduates while at the reception or poster session. I look forward to seeing old friends and making new friends who will be colleagues for a long time!

My first PLDI

I am Prasanna, a 5th year PhD student at IIT Bombay, India. This is my first PLDI and am very excited to attend it. I thank the student volunteer committee for picking me as a student volunteer and funding my travel.

I am super excited to see and listen to people like Matthias Felleisen, Olaf Chitil.  I am also presenting my work in ISMM, so people who are interested in Functional languages please come and attend my talk.

I would love to talk to other students attending and presenting their work at PLDI and other co-located conferences and get to know their work.

See you all in Santa Barbara :).

E-introduction before PLDI-2016

I am Sara Hamouda, a third year PhD student at the Australian National University. In my PhD, I am working on improving resilience in high level parallel programming languages, in particular languages following the APGAS programming model like X10.

PLDI-16 will be my first PLDI.  I am looking forward to attending PLMW and serving as a student volunteer for the first time. I will also be presenting a paper about a programming language that I love called X10. The paper is an outcome of an internship I had last year in IBM Watson Research Center, and it describes how we improved X10’s resilience support using an emerging fault tolerant MPI implementation called MPI-ULFM.  Feel free to chat with me about this paper, the internship experience, my home country Egypt, or other topics.

Finally, I would like to thank PLMW and the student volunteering committee for the generous funds which covered most of my travel expenses.

See you soon in Santa Barbara.

Best Regards,

Sara

PLDI 2016 : Coming soon ...

I am Jubi Taneja, third year PhD Student at University of Utah. I am working with Prof. John Regehr. My current research focus is on adding data flow analysis in Superoptimizers for LLVM IR.

I am glad to attend PLDI for second time. I am thankful to Student Volunteer Program for selecting me as a Student Volunteer and providing free registration to the conference. I also got a ticket for banquet dinner, the one event I love the most. :) A big thanks to PLMW@PLDI for giving me an opportunity to meet women in Programming Languages group. PLMW has provided me travel and accommodation funding. I am very excited to attend keynote lecture by Prof. Matthias Felleisen at PLMW.

I look forward to meet researchers contributing towards making compilers more precise by finding more optimizations.

See you all at Santa Barbara !!

Before my first PLDI

My name is Matthias Springer and I am a first-year PhD student at Tokyo Institute of Technology, working with Prof. Hidehiko Masuhara. My research interests are GPU computing, programming language design, and modularity.

I am very excited to join this year's PLDI as a student volunteer and am particularly looking forward to the ARRAY workshop and some interesting talks at the Research Track. This is the first time that I am attending PLDI and I hope that I can get inspiration and feedback for my own work, as well as meet and make friends with other students/researchers/organizers.