Thanks!

I had a great experience at PLDI.  In addition to seeing talks for some really interesting research, it was fun just to talk to folks in the hallways or during a meal.  I’m grateful to everyone who gave me positive feedback on my first PLDI talk!  So thank you to everyone who expressed interest in my research!

This was in fact my second PLDI, my first being the one last year that was incorporated into FCRC.  I really enjoyed the more intimate nature of this year’s PLDI -- although FCRC was a really exciting event, it was also a bit overwhelming to meet folks from so many different CS disciplines all at once.  I thought this year’s smaller venue and smaller crowd made it a lot easier to just bump elbows and start a casual conversation.

It’s hard to point out my favorite talks without doing an unintentional disservice to the other talks at PLDI, so I’ll just say that I was impressed with the overall quality of presentations, and I’ll definitely be following up by reading some of the papers presented this year.

Finally, some closing remarks.   The Great Wall really is very big.  The Forbidden City really is very big.  Scorpions look a lot scarier than they taste.

Thanks for such a great conference!

Greetings

I had a bit of (self­-induced) trouble getting write access to this blog, so apologies for posting this a bit late.

-----------------

Hi everyone,

I’m Alan Leung, a 2nd year PhD student at the University of California, San Diego. First things first, I just wanted to say how grateful I am for the generous travels grants that make travel to places like Beijing possible!

This year is the first time I’ll be presenting at PLDI, and I’m both excited and a bit anxious for my first chance to present the research we’ve done. I’ll be presenting the paper “Verifying GPU Kernels by Test Amplification,” where we explore a technique for verifying determinism in GPU kernels with a combination of dynamic race analysis and static information flow analysis. The key ingredient of our approach is that we can verify determinism using a single test execution, so long as we can show that the kernel always displays the same shared memory access behavior, regardless of the values its data inputs. We call this property access invariance. It turns out that a lot of kernels are in fact access invariant, making them amenable to our technique!

So, the first thing I hope to get out of this experience is a chance to get people as excited about the research as I am, through my talk, poster session, or maybe just chatting in the halls. The second thing I hope to gain is a new perspective on old problems, or just an awareness of new problems, by attending talks and meeting some of the brilliant folks in the PL world and beyond. Some of the best ideas can come out of the blue during a conversation. Finally, I’m a bit of a foodie, so in addition to all the food for thought we’ll get at the conference, I hope to get a chance to taste some of the great food Beijing has to offer!

Really looking forward to it!

Alan

Enjoyed PLDI and ECOOP

I had an amazing time at PLDI and ECOOP.  I heard a lot of interesting talks and was engaged in helpful conversations.  It was interesting to see that parsing was still not solved in a talk about a new tool for parsing C with macros.  I received interesting questions after my presentation of the paper, Java Wildcards Meet Definition-Site Variance.  Peking duck is delicious.  The knock off markets are fun to shop at (e.g. on Qiamen Street), if you like negotiating.  Walking around Tiananmen square was exciting.  I really enjoyed and learned a lot from attending PLDI and ECOOP.

Back from PLDI & LCTES

I’m very glad PLDI and LCTES are held in China this year. According to the statistics, there are more than 580 attendees and about 1/3 of them come from China. It’s really a great place to attend talks and communicate extensively with other researchers.

There are many impressive talks during the conferences. For example, there are researches focusing on how to map emerging applications onto heterogeneous platforms such as CPU, GPU, FPGA, many-core accelerator, which are very practical problems in the multicore era. Also, there are researches exploring the first scalable and precise data-race detection scheme for newly-born structured parallel programming model, and novel strategies to accelerate concurrency bug detection, which are very hot topics in parallel programming. These talks are quite related to researches in our team and I would like to bring back this information to classmates in our team.

It seems that there is a broad spectrum of attendees in PLDI and LCTES. Like Marc de Kruijf, I also come from the architecture community. By the way, my session chair Florence Maraninchi happens to be one of the PC in Design Automation Conference (DAC) this year; and I just attended the DAC conference in San Francisco a week ago before I went to PLDI & LCTES. Talking to researchers from different communities help me to broaden my outlook and think in new ways. And this will certainly help me to advance my future researches.

Finally, I want to extend my sincere thanks to all who were involved in organizing the conference, the ACM SIGPLAN PAC for funding my trip, everyone who presented, everyone who came to my talk and asked such excellent questions, all the student volunteers, and anyone else I'm forgetting.

Zhenman

Amazing PLDI

I am 2nd year Phd student @ University of Utah. This is my first PLDI. It was amazing.

At first, I was amazed by the fact that attendees come from so many different background,  through talking to those researchers in and out of my own area, I was inspired. Sometimes thoughts and ideas just pop up during the process!

I am happy that some of the talks with researchers in my own field have digged into reasonable depth, that help me compare and improve my own research.

I also had my first academic talk here (I mean in the PLAS 2012). On the practice talk,  I got help not only from professors' of my own university, but also from those people I talked with. It was very nice. and Thanks for their valuable suggestions and comments. 

Lastly, I would like to thank for people organizing this spectaculars events, and thanks for the grants to our students that do help relieve financial burden. Oh, Another person I should not forget to thank: our chair: Jan Vitek! Thank you for the *temporary* volunteer to the PLDI banquet, where I met and talked with more smart people and had great fun:)

Back from Beijing

Coming from the architecture community and never having never attended a PL conference before, I wasn't sure what to expect... but I had a great time! And I was very impressed by the quality of the talks, which were very accessible.  So kudos to everyone who gave a talk!

Some conferences have various camps in them that specialize in specific areas.  It seems PLDI has more of a spectrum of attendees.  There's the formal methods and semantics people who blend in with the functional programming people who then, in turn, cross over with object-oriented crowd who then also cross over with the hardware-optimizing compiler crowd.  And of course there's various mixtures everywhere in between.  I like how, despite the diversity, there's a lot of sharing of ideas in ways that is easy for others to grasp.

It was good fun but I'm glad to be back.  I hope to make it to PLDI again sometime in the coming years.  Thanks to NSF for helping fund us poor graduate students!  Thanks to the organizers for such a successful conference!  And thanks to all the other volunteers as well!

Hi all,

I'm Mike Vitousek, a first-year PhD student at University of Colorado at Boulder. This trip was my first visit to China, my first PLDI or ECOOP, my first presented technical talk, and the second conference I've attended. It was, of course, a really great experience!

I gave my first technical talk on the first day of the conference (at STOP, not at the main conference) and it was a great experience. In a lot of ways it was an ideal first talk, I think -- it was at a workshop filled with people who were all directly interested in the kinds of work that I'm doing. I was also proposing something somewhat controversial* so I got to experience (constructive) criticism of our ideas -- definitely a good thing! The rest of the STOP workshop was great too; I'm definitely interested in the dependent types in Javascript work that was presented and I'll be tracking the work on Big Bang with interest.

Beyond that, I liked a whole lot of the talks and sessions at PLDI and ECOOP. Some standouts for me were Hackett and Guo's work on Javascript type inference, the work from Rice on gradual permissions, the formal C# tutorial and the Grace tutorial. In addition, I really enjoyed meeting lots of people at PLDI, and there are a lot of people there that I hope to speak with and maybe work with in the future.

Basically, the trip was awesome and I'm really glad I was able to go on it. It made me think, and made me think about how I think. I'm looking forward to the next one!


* We proposed an approach to gradual typing that results in casts on objects permanently and monotonically making the object's type more specific, which could cause flow-sensitivity and "spooky action-at-a-distance." Check it out here: http://csel.cs.colorado.edu/~mivi2269/stop12/abstract.pdf)