Post-PLDI

Well it's back to work in St. Louis and I'm missing the Portland weather already.  PLDI '15 was another great experience to add to my grad school career.  Great talks, keynotes from multiple Turing award winners, great weather, and great people all in one place; there's not much more I could ask for.  I want to thank NSF again for making my travel and that of many others possible.  Also thanks to everyone in attendance for insightful conversation and advice.  I hope to see many of you again next PLDI.

Jon Shidal

Post-PLDI

I'm now back home after attending PLDI Monday through Wednesday. Overall, I think it was a good experience, and it lived up to my previously-mentioned expectations.

The weather in Portland was great! Clear and sunny every day.
I was able to attend several really great student talks, present my talk, get some work done with collaborators, and still have a little bit of free time to wander through Portland.

It was pretty amazing being a part of FCRC. I couldn't believe how many researchers and conferences were there (2300+ people, if I understood correctly)!

Hopefully I will have an opportunity to attend PLDI again in the future! Thanks again to the NSF for the student travel funding.

Regards,

jed

Post-PLDI

Thanks for the generous support from NSF for my trip. It is really a great experience for me to attend and give talk at PLDI.  I was kind of anxious at first, worrying about the my talk. But luckily, things went smoothly finally — the talk was in general good and conveyed the high level idea of my work. Moreover, It is great to see that people are interested. And I did have a good time chatting with people and received interesting feedback.

This year’s PLDI is quite special, it comes with FCRC.  It is really amazing to have two turing lectures — one from Michael Stonebraker and one from Andrew Yao — at one single meeting. They gives different ideas of how to conduct an efficient and successful research, but both illuminating.

Overall, this trip is a very worthful experience, and I am looking forward to the next PLDI conference.

Post-PLDI

This PLDI was an excellent experience overall. I was able to meet many new and old colleagues in the PLDI community. As a volunteer I assisted with any needs at the WAX workshop, which was very insightful. There were many interesting talks at this workshop, and I am looking forward to the authors to continue their work.

The PLDI talks were all very high quality as well. I tried to attend most of the talks, but made sure to pace myself to not get overly exhausted early on. All of the plenary speakers also had lots of insight, and it was interesting to see their perspective on what the future open problems there are for us to continue working on.

The really valuable experiences during PLDI was spending time networking with others during the lunch and dinner times. I was able to exchange business cards with many academic and industry professionals at each meal which was one of my goals. Spending time sharing my research with others also gave me many insights into how to take my project further, and many friendly suggestions were made on papers to read that may be of interest. I am very happy to have had funding provided from the NSF to attend. Attending conferences is one of the most important parts of a graduate students career, as it leads to new ideas, leads on jobs, and a chance to learn from excellent mentors outside of ones institution.

Heading to PLDI

I've made it to Portland despite some hiccups (don't go to SJC when your flight is out of SFO!) and am about to walk over to PLDI. This is my first time visiting Portland and my second time attending PLDI (I went in 2011, right before I started grad school, when it was in San Jose and Mozilla Research sent all of the Rust interns).

I'm excited to be giving the second conference talk of my career (and my first at PLDI) on the Typecoin system that my advisor and I designed. I'm also looking forward to being able to talk to people about my current research, on language memory models for low-level concurrency, and to see the large number of interesting lookup talks in that area.

I'd like to thank the NSF for the funding I needed to attend this conference!

Pre-PLDI 2015

I'm very excited to be attending PLDI 2015. This is my second time at PLDI. I was lucky enough to go to PLDI 2012 in Beijing when I was an undergraduate.  It was an excellent experience, and I learned a lot and met many people. I'm very grateful for the NSF travel support that makes it possible for me to go again.

This will be my first conference as a PhD student, and I will be giving a talk about work I did with Derek Dreyer and Viktor Vafeiadis during an internship at MPI-SWS last summer. Although I've had the chance to talk about this work at small seminars, I'm looking forward to being able to present it to a larger audience at PLDI.

One aspect of PLDI 2012 that was so enjoyable was the chance to talk to people in smaller groups about the work they had presented during some of the social events and time between talks. I'm hoping that will happen again at PLDI 2015.

I'm looking forward to meeting the other students there!

Pre-PLDI15

First, thanks for the travel grant support from NSF. I am very grateful for that!

I am Yufei Ding from North Carolina State University. My advisor is Dr. Xipeng Shen, and our research focuses on program optimization, input sensitivity analysis, generalized redundant computation elimination and program parallelization. With carefully designed program language and compiler support, we hope our technique could benefit more users without involving complicated programming.

This is my first time to attend the PLDI meeting. As you know, PLDI is one of the most top conference in my area. And joining this great conference with my own work "Autotuning Algorithmic Choice for Input Sensitivity" is so excited and honored. If you are interested in more details about my work, please come to my talk on Wednesday 09:40 - 10:05am.