Looking for PhD Students

I am hiring PhD students for 2024. Broadly, I do applied programming languages theory.

My main interest is in web browser implementation. I teach a course on web browsers, so prior experience is not important—but enthusiasm is! My research is often ultimately upstreamed into Chrome/Firefox.

One focus is dramatically speeding up browsers. I am pursuing projects here focusing on selector invalidation, attribute grammars, graphics languages, and more. Often this work involves applying PL tools to systems problems. A typical goal is speeding up some browser component by 2–3×, leading to a whole-browser speed-up by 1–3%.

I am also interested in adapting the browser to the application it is running. This could be automatic (like with my work on browser garbage collection) or involve better developer tools for performance tuning. The goal of this work is to make application frameworks like "Electron" or "React Native" more performant and more widely usable.

I am also pursuing a research program in floating-point accuracy, where I am interested in automatically improving accuracy and performance for both small and large numerical programs. I am particular interested in novel numeric representations, synthesizing library functions, and scaling error analysis. My research often gets upstreamed into my Herbie and FPBench tools.

If you are interested in these topics, please get in touch and apply to Utah. I am always happy to talk to potential students.