Post PLDI

My first PLDI experience was a great one, despite being a bit tired the first couple days.  It was nice to meet so many people interested in similar research and entertain great questions and ideas pertaining to my research.  The talks were all very interesting and very good work.  It was very nice meeting everyone and I look forward to being back in the future.

Attending PLDI

Set in the royal surroundings of Edinburgh, this year's PLDI was my most productive conference in terms of networking with people. Being quite close to graduation, this was especially helpful.

One of the most interesting and well delivered talks for me was Martin Rinard's recovery shepherding work. The whole idea of continuing to go on executing even when things go wrong is hard to conceive in practice, but Rinard's excellent oratorship could have swayed some members in the audience :) I had nice discussions with Vikram Adwe, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Yannis Smaragdakis, and got some feedback on my work. I also ended up meeting some local student volunteers for dinner after the SRC session, and got a flavor of Edinburgh student life style. The SRC session, though long and tiring, ended up being quite useful, generating a bit of a crowd and feedback.

The idea of having a one minute advertisement for upcoming talks worked out very well. Conferences with parallel tracks should try and adapt this. Previous conferences have tried poster sessions etc., to achieve a similar effect, but according to me, the ad-style works out very well.

Few of the talks were very refreshing with their ideas. The one on differentiating between shape-types and material-types in Java, and the large scale study that developers always separate between them was a pretty cool observation. Another one showed that testing for compiler bugs by eliminating input dependencies yields impressive results. MSR's tree-DSL for specifying and manipulation tree-based languages called Fast was quite interesting, and had a nice web front end to play with.

Overall, PLDI was a very fruitful experience, and I am looking forward to the next one at Portland!

Another spectacular PLDI

PLDI this year was amazing. I was surprised at the quality of the talks in general, and I especially enjoyed the "hallway track" conversations that surrounded them. Edinburgh was a great setting, too—there was plenty to explore before and after the conference.

Unsurprisingly, I was left with lots of opinions about the details of organizing a conference, from the significant to the mundane:

- I'm really happy that PLDI has gotten on the "lightning session" (teaser talk) bandwagon. Especially for multi-tracked conferences, it's really critical to judge which talks are likely to appeal.

- I'm less enthusiastic about poster sessions. I like having the opportunity to chat in more depth with presenters, but I don't think posters themselves are particularly useful—the in-person conversation is way more important, people generally don't seem to look at the visual aids much, and they take a lot of time to make in proportion to how useful they are. The sticker-based whisky sweepstakes were a nice touch at PLDI, though.

- As I think others have posted here, I wished many times for places to sit down during lunch. Stand-up lunches are space-efficient but exhausting.

I've also posed a blog-form summary of the paper I presented at PLDI, which I'll avoid duplicating here.

Back from Edinburgh

Attending PLDI has been a great experience for me. This is the first time I attended and presented at PLDI. I was anxious the days leading to the conference, mostly worried about my talk.  It helped that my talk was in the first session on the first day. My talk on "Test-Driven Repair of Data Races in Structured Parallel Programs" was well attended and I also got some interesting questions. I also had a poster on the same topic during which I received some very valuable suggestions and feedback. 

The general quality of the papers and presentations at PLDI were great. I liked the sessions on Parallelism, Scripting Languages, Synthesis and Races. I felt that the scheduling of the sessions could be better -- for instance having Parallelism 1 in parallel with Memory models didn't seem ideal.

I also got an opportunity to interact with Professors and leading researchers in programming languages. I sincerely thank SIGPLAN/NSF for the travel grant and My advisor Professor. Vivek Sarkar for making this trip possible.

Also my first PLDI

I really have to say I enjoyed PLDI this year. Besides extremely interesting talks, making connections to researchers is something I find invaluable. Also, presenting my poster on "Finding Minimum Type Error Sources" was a great experience. In the same spirit, I really plan to visit Edinburgh again. The city is really something special. I am looking forward to next PLDI!

My first PLDI

I thoroughly enjoyed my first PLDI. I found the list of accepted papers very interesting, I really enjoyed the Parallelism tracks. The one minute teasers was an excellent idea, it helped me choose which talks I wanted to achieve. The teaser by Martin Rinard was especially memorable.

The Future of PLDI session was also very enlightening. I enjoyed Jan and Sriram's impersonation of each other. I like the idea of having more dedicated reviewers per topic and the idea of the two-phase review process. I would also like to vote for automatic upgrade of the PLDI papers to Journals (with the authors having the option of submitting an extended version which is not bound by the page limits of PLDI).

My talks at the associated workshops (X10 and ARRAY) went very well too, got lots of interesting questions and positive feedback. I also had the opportunity to network and discuss with researchers in similar fields.

I'm also glad that I got to go to Edinburgh and experience the city. It is charming beautiful. After the conference, I also made a small trip around the Highlands - Isle of Skye, Loch Ness, Loch Lomond, etc. It is so green and peaceful. Definitely plan to visit Scotland again.

The poster session was very helpful, I got lots of interested listeners and useful feedback. I am very grateful to NSF-SIGPLAN for the travel support that I received. Looking forward to attending PLDI 2015.

Post PLDI

ISMM was amazing!!  It was great listening to what others were working on in terms of designing better garbage collectors, etc.  Even though my memory management background is not that strong, I was able to get the gist of many of the presentations.  It was very insightful listening to the key ideas and tricks that others presented.

This was also the first time that I gave a talk at a conference (as well as my first conference!).  It was definitely nerve-racking at first, but the anxiety went away soon afterwards.  I would definitely look forward to attending future conferences!

I'm also glad that I got to go to Edinburgh and experience the city.  The architecture was very pretty and the food was delicious.  I'd like to thank ACM, NSF, and Professor Zhang for giving me this opportunity!