Will Crichton
@tonofcrates
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Cognitive engineer, assistant professor @BrownUniversity.
🦋 or 🐘
Joined September 2011
I'm starting a new group at Brown w/ @ShriramKMurthi and @KathiFisler called the Cognitive Engineering Lab. We build tools to make you smarter, grounded in cognitive science and programming language theory. And we're hiring PhD students!
cel.cs.brown.edu
We research how to use computers to support complex cognitive tasks: programming, verification, communication, learning, and more.
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@mwillsey @ChandrakanaNaN @oflatt @pavpanchekha @ztatlock @DMerigoux @_protz_ @mathur_umang And, last but not least, highlight 4: "A Grounded Conceptual Model for Ownership Types in Rust" by @tonofcrates, Gavin Gray, and @ShriramKMurthi OOPSLA'23
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I would hate it if everyone read my dissertation. I bet you would find soooo many issues if you read it cover-to-cover and grappled with all the ideas. God forbid that people find the convenient link on my website:
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Are you a Ph.D. applicant interested in HCI? Consider applying to @PennHCI! This year, my group will have openings that could be great for those interested in HCI/Programming Languages or AI-augmented documents. DMs are welcome!
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Brown University's @tonofcrates optimized a #Python data analytics pipeline to make it 180,000x faster using #Rustlang. Join Will's #P99CONF talk in 5 minutes to look into this speedup that spanned the gamut of performance techniques. https://t.co/tYopOuXtDC
#ScyllaDB
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I gave a keynote at IWACO, "Explaining and Visualizing Rust's Ownership Model". I do a deep dive into how we designed and iterated on the borrow checker visualization. https://t.co/sEIwMNcIi0
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Also, I'm going to propose a new rule for Greek Letter Discourse. Before you're allowed to complain about how strange the notation is, you have to write one (1) proof about the meta-theory of a programming language.
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Comparing the sentential and symbolic representations of inference rules, you can start to appreciate the value of specialized notation. (Also, rather than a new Greek letter for each type of context, just use a natural language subscript!)
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Periodic reminder that we have an example of a high-quality language spec that is broadly accessible to both math-oriented and systems-oriented developers: WebAssembly!
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As the author of this PDF, it's been interesting seeing people guess at the rationale behind its design. However, the rationale had nothing to do with theory vs practice, and everything to do with pragmatically coping with an unaccommodated disability in academia. (1/16)
Compilers was was known to be the hardest CS class at Cornell which was hard as it is. We were handed a 8-page PDF at the start of sem for a language spec we'd be implementing by the end of sem, split into 6 parts. On part 5, the median was a 0/100 and most the class failed.
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And also: 10/25 5:20pm PT: OOPSLA - "Profiling Programming Language Learning"
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More in-person talks: 9/27: NEPLS - "How (Not) To Evaluate the Human Factors of PLs" 10/21 4:30pm PT: IWACO keynote - "Visualizing and Explaining Rust's Ownership Model" 10/25 11am PT: Pomona/Mudd CS Colloquium - "Building a Science of the Human Factors of Programming"
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If you're interested in programming languages and computing education, or programming language usability, I wonder where you should apply to graduate school. CC @tonofcrates @logicpreacher @KathiFisler
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Nobody panics when you cargo install a binary that could rm -rf your filesystem... but when you start calling it an "app", every OS loses its mind!
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Starting in <10min! Come ask me questions about cognition and programming!
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I'm calling for regulatory action against emoji designers. This is an unacceptable level of variance
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New paper from @kevin_x_li, @JacobKim489493, @neurocy (and me!) appearing at OOPSLA2024. TL;DR: We use cursor-local type & binding info from the Hazel language server to shape codegen prompts & stem hallucination, with supporting experiments for TypeScript (more in thread)
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★ Dynamicland's new website documents ten years of progress toward a humane dynamic medium.
dynamicland.org
Incubating a humane dynamic medium.
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