[PRL] Fwd: [MIT-PL] TALK:Tuesday 12-11-12 PL/SE Seminar: Making Programming Languages more Usable through Optimization

[David Van Horn]

Looks relevant to some folks in the PRL.  -- David


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [MIT-PL] TALK:Tuesday 12-11-12 PL/SE Seminar: Making 
Programming Languages more Usable through Optimization
Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:01:01 -0500
From: Csail Event Calendar <eventcalendar at csail.mit.edu>
To: pl at csail.mit.edu


PL/SE Seminar: Making Programming Languages more Usable through Optimization
Speaker: Ross Tate
Speaker Affiliation: Cornell University
Host: Adam Chlipala
Host Affiliation: CSAIL

Date: 12-11-2012
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Location: 32-G882 (reading room)

Programming languages have long had to carefully balance between human
usability and computational efficiency. Indeed, many programmers constantly
need to keep efficiency in mind as they implement their projects. This 
concern
often forces programmers to write code in ways that are hard for them and
their colleagues to read but which will execute more efficiently. This may
happen at fine-grained levels such as within a procedure, but it can even
force programmers to use library designs that they know are fragile and 
error
prone but which can get them the performance they need. In this 
presentation I
will present technologies that enable programmers to extend the compiler 
with
new optimizations by example and even to automatically infer optimizations
from library properties. These technologies allow programmers to write
intuitive code and execute efficient programs, thus making programming
languages more usable by lifting the burden of optimization.

Bio: Ross Tate is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University, having
recently graduated from the University of California, San Diego, where 
he was
advised by Sorin Lerner. His research ranges over a wide area of programming
languages and earned him the Microsoft Research Fellowship. Overarching his
projects is a proclivity for solving problems in daily programming by 
pulling
from theoretical domains such as category theory, logic, and semantics. 
In his
work a UCSD, he developed new techniques for inferring program optimizations
from simple language properties, and has since adapted those techniques to
translation validators used to verify the correctness of optimizations 
and to
enabling programmers to teach compilers new optimizations from simple
examples. In his work at Microsoft Research, he designed algorithms for
inferring memory safety of assembly code as part of a larger effort to 
build a
verified operating system. In his work with Red Hat, he is helping design a
type system with many object-oriented and functional features for their 
Ceylon
programming language while still guaranteeing decidability by building 
off his
solutions for Java's type system. In his work at Cornell, he formalized from
first principles effect systems and their semantics, producing new 
insights on
prior frameworks such as monads and identifying new opportunities for 
effects.

Relevant URL(S): http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ross/
For more information please contact: Adam Chlipala, adamc at csail.mit.edu

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