UW PLSE

UW CSE’s Programming Languages and Software Engineering group advances fundamental research and practical applications (some in this GitHub organization) in programming environments, program analysis, language design, synthesis, compilers, testing, verification, and security. We have strong ties to the Sampa and SAMPL groups, Intel, Cray, Microsoft Research, NVIDIA, AT&T, and others.

Are you an undergrad at UW who wants to get involved with our research? Check out our page on getting involved!

Recent Blog Posts

- 25 November 2024
- Doing research at PLSE as an undergraduate by Yihong Zhang
- keywords: #ugrad #ugrad-research
- 11 November 2024
- Using Odyssey to Analyze Floating Point Expressions by Ben Wang
- keywords: #floating-point
- 28 October 2024
- Designing a Data Reproduction Artifact by James Yoo
- keywords: #data-reproduction #data-reproducibility #open-science

See all blog posts

News

December 2024
Congratulations to Kenneth for Honorable Mention in the 2024-2025 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. Kenneth’s research projects include automating experimental methods in neuroscience, and evaluating merge algorithms for version control systems.
September 2024
Congratulations to Zach for his promotion to Professor!

Congrats to Ben, Sam, Ryan Featherman, Hannah, Ardi, and René for their paper Equivalent Mutants in the Wild: Identifying and Efficiently Suppressing Equivalent Mutants for Java Programs at ISSTA 2024.

Congrats to Audrey, Dan, and their collaborators for their paper Correctly Compiling Proofs About Programs Without Proving Compilers Correct at ITP 2024.

Congrats to James, Mike, and René, whose paper “Verifying the Option Type with Rely-Guarantee Reasoning” was accepted to ASE 2024.

Congrats to Benedikt Schesch, Ryan Featherman, Kenneth, Ben R. Roberts, and Mike, whose paper “Evaluation of Version Control Merge Tools” was accepted to ASE 2024.
August 2024
Congrats to Haoran, Mike, and their collaborators, whose paper “GoFree: Reducing Garbage Collection via Compiler-Inserted Freeing” was accepted to CGO 2025.
July 2024
Congrats to René, Mike, and their collaborators, whose paper “Call graph soundness in Android static analysis” was accepted to ISSTA 2024.

Congrats to Yihong, Remy, and Dan for their paper “Semantic foundations of equality saturation”, which is accepted at ICDT 2025.
May 2024
Congrats to René, Mike, and their collaborators, whose paper Are Mutants a Valid Substitute for Real Faults in Software Testing? will be awarded a Test of Time award at FSE 2024.

Congrats to Eunice, Edward, Jeff, and René, whose paper rTisane: Externalizing conceptual models for data analysis prompts reconsideration of domain assumptions and facilitates statistical modeling won a Best Paper award at CHI 2024

Shout out to Anjali, James, and Zach for organizing the PNW PLSE 2024 workshop, which was held on May 7th. Check out the link to see the full program!

Two PLSE-affiliated papers are selected for MIT PL Review 2024:

Better Together: Unifying Datalog and Equality Saturation by Yihong, Remy, Oliver, Zach, Max, and collaborators.

Efficient Bottom-Up Synthesis for Programs with Local Variables by Yihong and collaborators.
April 2024
Congrats to Amy, Yuxuan, Ben, Zach, and Adriana for their paper Computational Illusion Knitting, which is accepted at SIGGRAPH 2024.

Congrats to Thia for winning NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP) and Vishal for winning honorable mention.

Congrats to Gilbert and his collaborators, whose paper A Verified Compiler for a Functional Tensor Language is accepted at PLDI 2024.
March 2024
Congrats to Edward, Zach, and Steven for their paper Magic Markup: Maintaining Document-External Markup with an LLM at Programming with AI workshop collocated with <Programming> 2024.

The PLSE lab organized a game jam. Check out the poster and the games!
January 2024
The biweekly PLSE blog series is launched!
November 2023
Two papers from PLSE are accepted at ASPLOS 2024:

FPGA Technology Mapping Using Sketch-Guided Program Synthesis by Gus, Ben, Vishal, Andrew, Steven, Oak, René, Gilbert, and Zach

Avoiding Instruction-Centric Microarchitectural Timing Channels Via Binary-Code Transformations by Michael, Reshabh, Alexandra, Dan, and David.

Congrats to everyone!
October 2023
Congrats to Yihong and his collaborators whose paper Efficient Bottom-Up Synthesis for Programs with Local Variables is accepted at POPL 2024.

Congrats to Hannah and her collaborators whose paper Live Pattern Matching with Typed Holes won a distinguished paper award at OOPSLA.
September 2023
Oliver gave a talk on Making Interval Arithmetic Robust to Overflow at ARITH 2023.

Congrats to Andrew for winning the first place in the postgraduate category; Thia for winning the first place and Vishal for winning the third place in the undergraduate category at the Student Research Competition at ICFP 2023!

John co-organized the FARM workshop at ICFP, where Amy gave a talk on Exploring Self-Embedded Knitting Programs with Twine.

Congrats to Gus, who was awarded the Bonderman Fellowship for independent travel!
August 2023
PLSE remembers Cornell student and friend of the lab Priya Srikumar.

Five papers from PLSE are accepted to OOPSLA 2023:

Equality Saturation Theory Exploration à la Carte by Anjali, Brett, Ryan, Thia, Amy, Oliver, Max, Zach, and Chandra.

Live Pattern Matching with Typed Holes by Hannah and her collaborators.

A Pretty Expressive Printer by Sorawee, Emina, and their collaborators.

Rhombus: A New Spin on Macros Without All the Parentheses by Sorawee and his collaborators.

Inference of Resource Management Specifications by Mike and his collaborators.

Moreover, Mike and collaborators’ paper Pluggable Type Inference for Free is accepted to ASE 2023.

Sorawee and collaborators’ paper on Generating Conforming Programs With Xsmith is accepted to GPCE 2023.
July 2023
Congrats to Thomas and Hannah for winning first and second place in the ISSTA 2023 ACM Student Research Competition

Congrats to Edward, Caleb, Brett, Eunice, Zach, and Pavel, whose paper on Odyssey: An Interactive Workbench for Expert-Driven Floating-Point Expression Rewriting is accepted at UIST 2023.

Congrats to Jacob, Xi, Emina, and their collaborators for having their paper on Synthesis-Aided Crash Consistency for Storage Systems accepted at ECOOP 2023.

Zach and Pavel co-organized FPTalks 2023, where Edward gave a talk on Odyssey.

René co-organized ECOOP and ISSTA 2023.
June 2023
The PLSE lab played a big part at PLDI 2023:

Yihong presented the egglog paper.

Gus gave a talk at PLARCH on Generate Compilers from Hardware Models!.

Gilbert co-organized DRAGSTERS 2023. Gilbert gave a talk at ARRAY on “Performance vs. Correctness When Writing Low-Level HPC/Tensor/Array Code”.

Max and Zach co-organized the second EGRAPHS workshop; Oliver and Yihong presented.
May 2023
Remy and Eunice will join UCLA as Assistant Professors. Max will join UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor. Sorawee and Jacob will join Veridise. Congrats to all!

Anjali and Zach co-organized PNW PLSE 2023, which is a success. Hannah, Ardi, Eunice, Audrey, John, Gus, and many friends presented!
April 2023
Hannah and many friends at PLSE hosted a PLSE outreach activity for the Admitted Student Day.
March 2023
Alexandra received a fellowship from NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Congrats!
January 2023
Congrats to Remy, Max, and Dan Suciu, for their paper Free Join: Unifying Worst-Case Optimal and Traditional Joins, which will appear at SIGMOD 2023!
October 2022
Congrats to Hannah, Ardi, René, and collaborators for their Onward! paper on Contextualized programming language documentation, which will appear at SPLASH 2022!
September 2022
Congrats to Mike and his collaborators for their paper Call Me Maybe: Using NLP to automatically generate unit test cases respecting temporal constraints at ASE 2022!
July 2022
Gilbert Bernstein will be joining PLSE as an Assistant Professor in Jan. Welcome Prof. Bernstein!

Congrats to Oliver, Max, Zach, and collaborators for their paper Short Proofs from Congruence Closure accepted to FMCAD!

FPTalks ‘22 was successfully held on July 6, with a plethora of exciting talks. Congratulations!

Congrats to Sorawee, Emina, and their collaborators for their paper Testing Dafny (Experience Paper) accepted to ISSTA 2022.
June 2022
Congrats to Yihong for winning the second place at the Grand Finals of the ACM Student Research Competition!

EGRAPHS ‘22, the first ever workshop dedicated to e-graphs and related techniques, was successfully held. Shout out to Max and Zach for organizing it!
May 2022
Congrats to Martin, Mike, and their collaborators for their paper on Accumulation Analysis at ECOOP 2022!
March 2022
Martin will join NJIT as an Assistant Professor, congratulations and please keep in touch!

Eunice, Audrey, René, and Jeff received an honorable mention for their paper on Tisane, at CHI 2022!

Dan Suciu, Remy, and collaborators’ work Convergence of Datalog over (Pre-) Semirings is named a Best Paper at PODS 2022!

Rock, Katharina, and René’s work on Scaffolding Preregistrations to Automatically Generate Analysis Code and Methods Descriptions will appear at CHI 2022, Congrats!
January 2022
René and collaborators’ work on Repairing brain-computer interfaces with fault-based data acquisition will appear at ICSE 2022, Congrats!

Sam, Ryan, René, and collaborators’ work on Prioritizing mutants to guide mutation testing will appear at ICSE 2022, Congrats!

Eunice, Melissa, René, and collaborators’ work on Hypothesis formalization has been published at TOCHI, Congrats!

René and collaborators’ work on Comparing mutation tools for research, education, and practice has been accepted to CACM, Congrats!
December 2021
Mike He received an honorable mention from the CRA outstanding undergraduate researcher award. Congrats!

Eunice, Audrey, René and collaborator’s work on Tisane will appear at CHI 2022, Congrats!
October 2021
4 papers from PLSE are accepted at POPL’22:

James and collaborators’ paper Induction Duality: Primal-Dual Search for Invariants

James and collaborators’ paper Property-Directed Reachability as Abstract Interpretation in the Monotone Theory

Yihong, Remy, Max, and Zach’s paper Relational E-Matching

Sorawee, Luke, Xi and Emina’s paper A formal foundation for symbolic evaluation with merging

Congrats to all!

Congrats to Chandra, Max, Amy, Remy, Brett, Adam, Adriana, Dan, and Zach for their Distinguished Paper award at SPLASH’21 for their work on Rewrite Rule Inference Using Equality Saturation!

Congrats to Jacob and collaborators for their Best Paper Award at SOSP’21 for their work on Using Lightweight Formal Methods to Validate a Key-Value Storage Node in Amazon S3!
September 2021
Congrats to Melissa and Eunice for their paper Adapting Reorderable Matrices for Qualitative Analysis accepted to the IEEE Visualization 2021 workshop on Human-Data Interaction!

Congrats to Remy and his collaborators for their paper Optimizing Recursive Queries with Program Synthesis accepted to SIGMOD 2022!

Eunice and Chandra will attend Rising Stars 2021. Make sure to catch them in Boston if you’re there!
August 2021
Congrats to Remy and his collaborators for their paper on Convergence of Datalog over (Pre-) Semirings accepted at PODS 2022!

Congrats to Jasper, Chandra, and their collaborators for their paper: “Taxon: Language for Formal Reasoning with Digital Fabrication Machines” accepted at UIST 2021!

Congrats to Chandra, Adam, Adriana, Dan, and Zach and their collaborators for their paper: “A Roadmap Towards Parallel Printing for Desktop 3D Printers” accepted at SFF 2021!
July 2021
Congrats to Chandra, Max, Amy, Remy, Brett, Adam, Adriana, Dan, and Zach for their paper on using Equality Saturation for Rewrite Rule Inference at OOPSLA 2021!
June 2021
Congrats to Yihong and Caleb, who tied for the first place at the Student Research Competition at PLDI’21!

Congrats to Emina for receiving the Robin Milner Young Researcher Award!

Talia defended her thesis! Congrats Dr. Ringer!!

Chandra defended her thesis too and will join Certora as a Senior Researcher. Congrats Dr. Nandi!!
May 2021
Congrats to Emina and Xi on their Amazon Research Award for advancing automated verification for critical infrastructure software!

Gus, Andrew, Steven, Luis, Zach, and collaborators’ paper, “Pure, Low-Level Tensor Program Rewriting via Access Patterns” will appear at MAPS’21!

Brett, Chandra, Zach, and collaborators from University of Utah got their paper on Combining Precision Tuning and Rewriting accepted at ARITH’21!

Congrats to Martin, and collaborators for their new FSE acceptance “Lightweight and Modular Resource Leak Verification”!

Congrats to Zhen, Mike and collaborators for their new FSE acceptance “Checking Conformance of Applications against GUI Policies”!

Talia will join UIUC as an assistant professor. Exciting news for both Talia and UIUC!!

Max and Joe both defended their thesis! Congrats Dr. Willsey and Dr. Redmon!!
April 2021
Yihong’s work on Relational E-matching is accepted to PLDI SRC, make sure to check out his poster!

Steven, Mike He, Gus, Zach, and collaborators’ paper From DSLs to Accelerator-Rich Platform Implementations: Addressing the Mapping Gap will appear at LATTE’21. Make sure to checkout Steven’s talk!
March 2021
Congrats to Chenglong, Ras, and Amy Ko for winning the CHI 2021 Best Paper Award with their paper Falx: Synthesis-Powered Visualization Authoring!
February 2021
Two papers from PLSE are accepted to PLDI’21:

Proof Repair Across Type Equivalences by Talia, RanDair Porter, Dan & collaborators

Reticle: A Virtual Machine for Programming Modern FPGAs by Luis, Joseph, Dan, Luis and collaborators. Congrats all!
January 2021
3 papers from PLSE will appear at MLSys 2021:

“Efficiently Compiling Dynamic Neural Networks for Model Inference” by Jared, Zach, and their collaborators;

“Equality Saturation for Tensor Graph Superoptimization” by Max, Remy, and their collaborators;

“A Learned Performance Model for the Tensor Processing Unit” by Sam and collaborators.

Marisa, Steven, Altan, Mike, Jared, Zach and collaborators’ paper “Dynamic Tensor Rematerialization” is accepted to ICLR 2021!
December 2020
Chenglong, Ras, Amy, and their collaborators’ work “Falx: Synthesis-powered Visualization Authoring” was accepted to CHI 2021!

Rashmi, Jason, Suzzane and Mike’s paper “Verifying Determinism in Sequential Programs” was accepted to ICSE 2021!

René and his collaborators’ paper “Does mutation testing improve testing practices?” was accepted to ICSE 2021!

Max, Chandra, Remy, Zach and collaborators’ work on egg was named a Distinguished Paper at POPL 2021!

Zach, Luis, Luis, and Jared were all involved in hosting or presenting at TVMConf! Check out the videos here.
November 2020
Maaz received a distinguished reviewer award as part of the OOPSLA 2020 AEC! Congrats, Maaz!

Talia will be giving a talk to CMU’s Principles of Programming group.

Julie is presenting her work at OOPSLA 2020.

Josh is presenting his bachelor’s thesis work at PLATEAU 2020.

Jared defended his thesis! Congrats, Dr. Jared!
September 2020
Congrats to Julie, Ras, and collaborators on the OOPSLA 2020 acceptance!

Max, Remy, Chandra, Zach and collaborators’ work on egg was accepted to POPL 2021! Congrats, all!

James Wilcox also has an accepted POPL 2021 paper with his collaborators.
May-August 2020
Talia ran a long-term mentoring program that matched 173 mentees with 95 mentors from around the world! At ICFP 2020, Talia also co-chaired the largest PLMW ever.

Congrats to Martin, Mike, and collaborators for the acceptance of their paper “Continuous Compliance” at ASE! Check out the camera ready here!

Remy and his collaborators’ work on SPORES appeared at VLDB!

Jacob gave a talk at CAV! Check it out here

The DTR team (Marisa, Steven, Altan, Mike He, Tianqi, and Zach) won the ADA demo award! Congrats, all!

Congrats to PLSE alumnus James Wilcox for his PLDI best paper!

Talia gave a talk on Proof Transformation as part of the logic supergroup.

Members of PLSE participated in Shut down academia to discuss meaningful changes to address anti-black racism in our communities.
May 4 2020
Huge congrats to Mike for receiving the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award for his work on programmer productivity!
April 5 2020
Congrats to Jacob, Luke, Xi, Emina, and their collaborators from UT Austin for their CAV 2020 paper on Synthesizing JIT Compilers for In-Kernel DSLs!
April 1 2020
Congrats to Talia for receiving a PEO scholar award!
MAr 30 2020
Congrats to Josh for receiving the NSF GRFP!
Mar 16 2020
Amanda is joining Apple as a Research Engineer! Congratulations!!
Mar 9 2020
Carpentry Compiler by Chandra, Zach, and their collaborators from GRAIL was once again featured in a news article, this time in The Daily!
Feb 27 2020
Chandra, Max, Adam, James W., Zach, Eva, and Dan’s paper on using Equality Saturation for Synthesizing Structured CAD models is accepted to PLDI 2020!
Feb 10 2020
Talia organized a panel at POPL. Her summary of the panel with links to the recording can be found in both the SIGPLAN Blog and the SIGOPS Blog. Check it out!
Feb 9 2020
Gus’s paper, Enumerating Hardware-Software Splits with Program Rewriting, was accepted to the Young Architect Workshop at ASPLOS2020.
Dec 9 2019
Congrats to Martin, Mike, and their collaborators for their paper on Verifying Object Construction at ICSE 2020!
Dec 9 2019
Congrats to Amanda, Chenglong and Amy, and co-authors Alannah Oleson and James Fogarty for their acceptance of their paper “Scout: Rapid Exploration of Interface Layout Alternatives through High-Level Design Constraints” to CHI ‘20.
Dec 2 2019
Carpentry Compiler by Chandra, Zach, and their collaborators from GRAIL featured on UW News!
Nov 27 2019
Congrats to Talia, Alex, Dan, and Sorin on their CPP 2020 paper about analyzing the changes that proof engineers make to programs, specifications, and proofs in Coq!
Nov 14 2019
Martin Kellogg won gold at the Student Research Competition at ASE with his work on compile-time detection of machine image sniping!
Nov 10 2019
Congrats to Chenglong, Yu, Ras, Alvin, and collaborators on their POPL 2020 paper on visualization by example!
Nov 7 2019
Congrats to Sorawee, James Bornholt and Emina for their VMCAI 2020 paper on fixing code that explodes under symbolic evaluation!
Nov 3 2019
Max is giving an invited talk about Puddle at ICCAD!
Oct 28 2019
Congrats to Luke, James Bornholt, Emina, Xi, and collaborators on their Best Paper Award at SOSP!
Oct 23 2019
OctoML secured millions in funding! Congrats Luis, Jared, Zach, and all others involved outside of PLSE!
Oct 22 2019
Josh will give a talk about his work on Theia with Jared, Doug, and Zach as part of SPLASH-E!
Sep 18 2019
Talia will give a talk about her work on proof engineering at UMass Amherst on November 6th as part of the Rising Stars in CS Lecture Series!
Sep 3 2019
Talia, Zach, and collaborators just dropped some big knowledge about writing big proofs! Check out QED at Large: A Survey of Engineering of Formally Verified Software.
July 29 2019
PLSE has two papers at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2019: Maaz and his collaborators for their work on lifting legacy image processing functions to high level DSLs, and Chandra, Zach and their collaborators for their work on compilers for carpentry. Congratulations!
July 27 2019
Talia will be attending Rising Stars this year!
July 21 2019
James W. joined Certora as their CTO!
July 19 2019
Pavel joined Utah’s School of Computing as an Assistant Professor!
July 11 2019
James Bornholt will be joining UT Austin as an Assistant Professor in 2020!
July 1 2019
Congrats to Pavel, Zach, Mike, and their collaborator, Shoaib Kamil for their latest Cassius paper at OOPSLA 2019!
Jun 1 2019
Congrats to Talia, Nate, John Leo, and Dan on their ITP paper: Ornaments for Proof Reuse in Coq. Talia will be talking about this and other proof-related work at the Coq Users and Developers Workshop!
May 9 2019
Watch out world! Three PLSE undergrads are heading off to grad school in the fall: David to UCSD, Nate to Northeastern, and Jasper to CMU.
Apr 24 2019
Doug will be heading to Brown in the fall as a lecturer. Congrats Doug!
April 16 2019
James W., and Zach together with their collaborators have papers in CAV 2019! Congratulations!!
Mar 18 2019
Chenglong got a paper into CVPR 2019!
Mar 15 2019
Our very own John Toman defended his PhD! 🎓
Feb 20 2019
Bill’s paper on tracking floating point precision got into CONGA, where Zach will be giving the keynote!
Feb 5 2019
Jasper’s paper on Inductive-Inductive Types in Cubical Type Theory got into FoSSaCS 2019.
Dec 21 2018
Congrats to Doug, Mike, Zach, and their Systems collaborators Ellis, and Tom for their EuroSys 2019 paper on DSLabs!
Dec 5 2018
Ras was named an ACM Fellow for his contributions to program synthesis. Congrats!
Nov 21 2018
Chandra won the Adobe Research Fellowship!
Nov 7 2018
Zach and Karl won a Facebook Continuous Reasoning Research Award for their work on continuous program verification.
Nov 7 2018
Congrats to Max, Mangpo, Sam, and Ras for their ASPLOS 2019 acceptances!
Oct 31 2018
Max’s work on Puddle was a runner-up for the Madrona Prize at the Allen School’s Industrial Affiliates event.
Oct 28 2018
Sarah traveled all over, giving talks at UMass Amherst, PROBPROG, and UIST, as well as attending Rising Stars.
Oct 26 2018
James gave a talk at NESVD about his work on distributed systems verification.
Oct 26 2018
Chenglong and his collaborators won InfoVis Best Paper for their work on Draco!
Oct 26 2018
Talia gave a talk at UCSD on her automated proof repair work.
Oct 24 2018
Chandra gave a talk on her Reincarnate work at MPI-SWS.
Oct 18 2018
Jared and his collaborators merged Relay, a new high-level IR, into the TVM machine learning stack.
Oct 10 2018
Congrats to John and Dan! Their work on Concerto will appear in POPL 2019.
Oct 4 2018
PLSE kicked off the Allen School autumn colloquium series with fantastic talks from John, Pavel, James B., James W., and Doug!
Sep 29 2018
Pavel gave talks at both RacketCon and NPFL.
Sep 25 2018
Amanda gave a talk at the Berkeley Institute of Design about inferring user interface structure.
Sep 24 2018
Chandra gave a talk at ICFP on her work on Reincarnate.
Aug 29 2018
Congrats to Ali, Ras and their collaborators for their paper on the TPS project accepted in the Cell Reports journal!
Aug 16 2018
Congrats to Chenglong, James, Alvin, Emina, and Ras for their papers at OOPSLA 2018!
Aug 6 2018
Congrats to Sarah, Ras and their collaborators for their paper on scraping distributed web data at UIST 2018!
July 23 2018
Zach taught distributed system verification at the DeepSpec Summer School in Princeton!
July 17 2018
Emina and Mike gave two keynotes for ISSTA in Amsterdam!
July 16 2018
Pavel, Zach and their collaborators presented their paper on Tools for Floating-Point Computations at FM in Oxford, UK!
July 8 2018
Zach gave the keynote for The Coq Workshop in Oxford, UK!
June 20 2018
UW PLSE students had several great talks and papers at PLDI! Pavel on VizAssert, Alex on Herbgrind, and James and Doug on modular verification of distributed Systems!
June 16 2018
Congrats to Shumo, Jared, Brendan Murphy, Alvin and their collaborators for their paper on SQL semantics in VLDB 2018!
June 15 2018
Congrats to the Herbie team for releasing Herbie 1.2!
June 11 2018
Beep! Brrrzzzz. Zach and Dan just received an NSF grant to continue their work on PL foundations for 3D printing.
June 8 2018
Congrats to Stuart, Calvin, Eric, and Ali for graduating with PhDs! 🎓
June 1 2018
Congrats to Calvin, Mike and Emina for Distinguished Paper at ICSE’18 for Cozy.
May 17 2018
Beep! Brrrzzzz. Chandrakana, James, Taylor, Dan and Zach’s paper on Functional Programming for Compiling and Decompiling CAD has been accepted to ICFP 2018!
May 11 2018
Congrats to Sam and his collaborators for their SecDev 2018 paper on Checked C!
Apr 30 2018
Congrats to Martin and Mike for their ISSTA 2018 papers!
Apr 15 2018
Jared’s ASPLOS 2017 paper with UCSB collaborators was selected as an IEEE Micro Top Pick!
Apr 11 2018
Congrats to John and Dan for their ECOOP 2018 paper!
Apr 10 2018
Congrats to Jared, Steven, Josh, Logan, Tianqi, and Zach for their MAPL 2018 paper!
Apr 9 2018
Congrats to Eric, Pavel, Zach and their collaborators for their CAV, ITP and FM 2018 papers!
Apr 5 2018
Joe won a Google PhD Fellowship!
Apr 3 2018
Congrats to Max for receiving an NSF Honorable mention!
Mar 11 2018
Congrats to Amy Ko for being recognized with the ICSE 2018 10-year most influential paper award!
Mar 1 2018
Make sure to submit to PNW PLSE 2018!
Feb 2018
Check out James Wilcox’s article in CACM on Highlights in Systems Verification!
Feb 28 2018
Don’t miss James Wilcox presenting VerifiedFT at PPoPP 2018!
Feb 12 2018
Congrats to Michael Ernst for earning the ISSTA 2018 Impact Paper Award!
Feb 12 2018
Congrats to Pavel, Adam, Mike, Zach, Doug, James, and their coauthors on PLDI’18 acceptances. Come see the talks in Philly!
Feb 4 2018
Joe is giving a TED talk on YOLO!
Jan 24 2018
Œuf is now open source. Check it out on GitHub!
Jan 19 2018
Zach won an NSF CAREER award!
Jan 18 2018
James Bornholt receives a 2018 Facebook Fellowship.
Jan 13 2018
James Wilcox will have a paper at PPoPP 18: VerifiedFT: A Verified, High-Performance Dynamic Race Detector
Dec 11 2017
Congrats to Amanda and Amy for their acceptance of their paper “Rewire: Interface Design Assistance from Examples” to CHI ‘18.
Nov 19 2017
UW PLSE will be out in force at POPL 2018!

We have three papers at POPL:
- James and Zach (with Ilya Sergey) on a logic for distributed systems verification
- Emina (with Northeastern PRL) on Typed Rosette
- Ras (with Kartik Chandra) on type system verification and synthesis
We also have two papers at CPP:
- Talia, Nate, and Dan (with John Leo) on automated proof repair
- Eric, Stuart, James, Zach, and Dan on verified extraction of verified code
And one at OBT!
- Max and Jared on Extensible Semantics for Fluidics.
See you in Los Angeles!
Oct 7 2017
Mangpo will be giving a talk on her work High-Coverage Hint Generation for Racket Programming Assignments with Berkeley colleagues at RacketCon 2017!
Oct 3 2017
Rashmi Mudduluru will be giving a talk on her work Lasso Detection Using Partial State Caching with MSR colleagues at FMCAD 2017!
Sept 7 2017
Amy just received a grant to investigate different programming strategies together with Thomas LaToza. Congrats, Amy and Thomas, and we’re excited to see the results of the work.
Aug 11 2017
Congrats on OOPSLA’17 acceptances for Talia (for Iorek), Sarah and Ras (for Ringer), and Dan and UW PLSE alumnus Ben Wood (on dynamic race detection).
Jul 31 2017
Congrats to Julie for her Onward! 2017 paper on Internet of Things automation.
Jul 22 2017
Joe’s YOLO9000 just won Best Paper Honorable Mention at CVPR’2017!
Jul 19 2017
Cosette, by UW PLSE members Shumo, Konstantin, Chenglong, and Alvin, has just been released! Check out this automatic way to check whether SQL queries are equivalent.
Jul 11 2017
At this year’s ICSE, Mike won the Most Influential Paper Award, along with coauthors Carlos Pacheco, Shuvendu K. Lahiri, and Thomas Ball, for Feedback-Directed Random Test Generation, published ten years ago. Congratulations, Mike!
Jun 26 2017
Martin and Calvin were grand finalists in the ACM’s 2017 Student Research Competition—Martin took 3rd in the undergrad category and Calvin 3rd in the graduate category. Congrats to both of them, and to Mike, who advises both of them.
Jun 9 2017
Congratulations to Max and Vincent for winning a 2017 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for their project on domain-specific reconfigurable accelerators! This is Vincent’s second QIF win.
Jun 2 2017
Congratulations Alex, who just defended his Ph.D! Alex will graduate at the end of the quarter and begin working on combining program synthesis with deep learning to improve programming productivity and AI capabilities.
May 1 2017
UW PLSE has two papers in ICFP 2017! Congratulations to Jared and his collaborators for their paper on Lean, and to Konstantin, Steven, Emina, Mike, Zach, and their collaborator Stefan for their paper on SpaceSearch!
May 1 2017
Herbie 1.1 has been released. Good work, Pavel, Jason, Alex, and Zach!
Apr 27 2017
Mike is giving an invited talk at ETAPS 2017, discussing his work on using natural langauge processessing to understand non-semantic portions of code. Do not miss it!
Apr 25 2017
You cannot miss Joe’s talk, at TED 2017. Tech.co called Joe one of the five most notable TED speakers this year, next to Elon Musk and Serena Williams.
Apr 24 2017
Congratulations to Chandrakana, Dan, and their coauthors for their paper, “Debugging Probabilistic Programs”, at MAPL 2017.
Apr 18 2017
Congratulations to Alvin and Emina on receiving CAREER awards from the NSF.
Apr 15 2017
Remy (Yisu) Wang, Zhen Zhang, and Rashmi Mudduluru will be joining UW PLSE next year. Welcome!
Apr 15 2017
Congrats to Ryan and Luke, who have chosen graduate schools where they will pursue their PhDs. Ryan’s going to Cornell, while Luke is staying here at UW!
Apr 12 2017
Congratulations to Sarah and Mangpo for their paper, “Data-Driven Synthesis of Full Probabilistic Programs”, at CAV 2017.
Mar 7 2017
Congratulations to Konstantin on passing his Ph.D. Defense! Konstantin will graduate at the end of the quarter and move on to applying his research on verifying network configuration at the Google networking team.
Mar 3 2017
Joe’s YOLO9000 has been accepted to CVPR’17: better, faster, strong object detection with a single net.
Feb 24 2017
Congratulations John, Dan, James, Zach, Ras, Mangpo, Nate, Chandrakana, and Mike, their coauthors, and the several UW PLSE alumni on their accepted papers to SNAPL’17!
Feb 13 2017
James and Emina’s paper on memory model synthesis; Shumo, Konstantin, and Alvin’s paper on HoTTSQL; Chenglong, Alvin, and Ras’s paper on SQL query synthesis; and Grigory, Maaz, and Ras’s work on static parallelization have all been accepted to PLDI 17! Congratulations!
Feb 3 2017
Zach gave a talk at the University of Utah on floating point at the University of Washington: Herbie, Herbgrind, and FPBench.
Jan 16 2017
Congratulations Mike on winning the ICSE 2017 Most Influential Paper award for his work on feedback-directed random test generation.
Jan 16 2017
Jared helped give a tutorial on his work adding native compilation to the LEAN theorem prover. Check it out!
Dec 14 2016
Evaluating & improving fault localization techniques was accepted to ICSE 2017. It’s by Spencer Pearson, ex-postdoc René Just (now at UMass), Michael Ernst, Deric Pang, Benjamin Keller, and their colleagues at Sheffield and Porto.
Dec 9 2016
Melissa Galloway was featured in UW CSE’s Undergrad Spotlight.
Dec 9 2016
Congratulations to Chris Mackie and Nate Yazdani, honorable mentions for 2017 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers!
Nov 17 2016
Calvin Loncaric and Spencer Pearson were 1st- and 3rd-place graduate students, and Martin Kellogg and Chris Mackie were 1st- and 3rd-place undergraduate students, in the FSE student research competition
Nov 4 2016
Congratulations to Helgi Sigurbjarnarson, James Bornholt, Emina Torlak, and Xi Wang for winning best paper “Push-Button Verification of File Systems via Crash Refinement” at OSDI 2016!
Nov 1 2016
Amy Ko gave a keynote A human view of programming languages at SPLASH 2016
Oct 5 2016
Luke will present a poster on his and Jared’s work on bootstrapping a secure eBPF compiler in Coq at OSDI 2016!
Sep 18 2016
Emina Torlak gave the keynote at RacketCon2016
Aug 30 2016
Chandrakana and Mike’s work on program analyses for smart home security has been accepted to PLAS 2016!
Aug 19 2016
UW had eight (!) papers accepted to the FSE 2016 Student Research Competition. Congratulations to Waylon Huang, Wing Lam, Calvin Loncaric, Martin Kellogg, Chris Mackie, Chandrakana Nandi, Spencer Pearson, Joe Santino. Their advisor is Michael Ernst.
Aug 3 2016
Congratulations to everyone accepted to OOPLSA 2016! Cassius, Bagpipe, Ringer, and Calvin’s work with Samsung Research America
Jul 27 2016
Ivan a UW alum, Yuriy a UW postdoc alum, Patty, and Mike’s paper, Debugging Distributed Systems appeared in CACM August 2016 issue!
Jul 25 2016
Talia, Franzi, and Dan’s paper, “AUDACIOUS: User-Driven Access Control with Unmodified Operating Systems” to appear in ACM CCS 2016!
Jul 20 2016
Staccato won both the Distinguished Artifact and Distinguished Poster awards at ECOOP 2016. Congrats, John and Dan!
Jul 5 2016
PLSE swept the best student paper awards at SYNT 2016! Maaz and Alvin won for their work on verified lifting for data processing; Julie came in second for her work on synthesis for robot motion planning.
Jun 21 2016
Ras wins an Influential Paper Award from ISCA for his 2001 paper Focusing Processor Policies via Critical-Path Prediction.
May 9 2016
Konne will be presenting Bagpipe’s BGP formalization in Brazil at NetPL 16.
May 7 2016
Recent PLSE alum and soon-to-be Cornell professor Adrian Sampson won UW CSE’s William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award!
May 4 2016
Alvin won the DoE Early Career Award!
Apr 25 2016
Alvin and his collaborators from MIT, Stanford, and Barefoot Networks’ work on programmable switches was accepted to SIGCOMM 2016.
Apr 18 2016
Ivan, Patty, Yuriy, and Mike’s paper on Debugging distributed systems is the cover story in the March/April 2016 issue of ACM Queue.
Apr 17 2016
Mike, Alberto, Alessandra, and Mauro’s paper on Automatic generation of oracles for exceptional behaviors was accepted to ISSTA 2016.
Apr 16 2016
Mike, Damiano, Massimo, and Fausto’s paper on Semantics for locking specifications was accepted to NFM 2016.
Apr 15 2016
Neutrons was accepted to CAV’16. If you’re there, come to the talk to learn about verifying a neutron therapy machine.
Mar 29 2016
Congratulations to Talia Ringer and Amanda Swearngin for winning NSF graduate fellowships!
Mar 1 2016
John and Dan’s paper on Staccato, a bug finder for dynamic configuration updates, and Chenglong’s paper on API adaptation will appear at ECOOP 2016!
Feb 29 2016
YOLO has been accepted to CVPR’16. Congrats to Joe!
Feb 26 2016
Xi’s work on undefined behavior detection appears in this month’s Communications of the ACM.
Feb 23 2016
Emina Torlak won the AITO Dahl-Nygaard prize and the Sloan Fellowship!
Jan 20 2016
We have three papers accepted to PLDI 2016: Calvin, Emina, and Mike’s data structure synthesis with Cozy; Eric, Daryl, Zach, and Dan’s verified peephole optimizations with Peek; and Alvin’s verified lifting of stencils with STNG.
Jan 19 2016
Mike and Javier’s paper on Locking discipline inference and checking was accepted to ICSE 2016.
Jan 11 2016
Konstantin Weitz was a finalist for the Facebook Fellowship Program!
Dec 21 2015
Pavel Panchekha won the Adobe Research Fellowship. Congrats!
Dec 17 2015
Daryl Zuniga won the prestigious UW Mary Gates Scholarship and an Honorable Mention for the CRA Undergraduate Research Award!
Dec 4 2015
Our paper on verifying Raft in Verdi will appear at CPP 2016!
Nov 17 2015
PLSE has four papers accepted to ASPLOS’16: approximate image and video storage, scalable superoptimization, DNA-based storage, and formal specifications for file system crash-consistency. See you in Atlanta!
Nov 17 2015
Alvin Cheung won MIT’s George M. Sprowls Award for outstanding PhD theses in computer science!
Oct 5 2015
James, Emina, Dan, and Luis’s paper on optimizing program synthesis with metasketches has been accepted to POPL 2016.
Sep 17 2015
Sam just won the Lockheed Martin Award for Best Engineering Project at the Young Software Engineer Awards. Woohoo!
Aug 3 2015
PLSE sent four papers to OOPSLA this year: on object-oriented constraint solving, constraint programming, synthesis of layout engines, and a framework for synthesis.
Jul 20 2015
The PLSE group has five papers accepted to ASE’15: evaluating test generation, handling reflection in static analysis, Crust, history granularity transformations, and dynamic race detection. Don’t miss it!
Jun 27 2015
Timelapse has been accepted to UIST’15. Come find out about diffing web interfaces.
Jun 16 2015
The Herbie and Verdi projects killed it at PLDI’15. Didn’t make the talks? Check out the project pages.
May 7 2015
The Herbie paper won Distinguished Paper at PLDI. Make sure you go see the talk!
May 4 2015
UW PLSE at SNAPL’15: a dependency case language for a neutron therapy machine, and hardware-software co-design!
Apr 7 2015
Ras Bodik is joining UW PLSE. We’re so incredibly excited to work with him!
Mar 31 2015
Congrats Doug Woos and Pavel Panchekha, two students in UW PLSE, who just became NSF fellows.
Jan 18 2015
Verso presenting first steps toward low-level optimizations in CompCert, at CoqPL’15.