Research

We aim to develop a systematic framework for robots to build models of the world and to use these to make effective and safe choices of actions to take in complex scenarios.

The project concerns algorithmic solutions for writing fast codes.

Alloy is a language for describing structures and a tool for exploring them. It has been used in a wide range of applications from finding holes in security mechanisms to designing telephone switching networks. Hundreds of projects have used Alloy for design analysis, for verification, for simulation, and as a backend for many other kinds of analysis and synthesis tools, and Alloy is currently being taught in courses worldwide.

We study the fundamentals of Bayesian optimization and develop efficient Bayesian optimization methods for global optimization of expensive black-box functions originated from a range of different applications.

Traffic is not just a nuisance for drivers: It’s also a public health hazard and bad news for the economy.

This project aims to design parallel algorithms for shared-memory machines that are efficient both in theory and also in practice.

We plan to develop a suite of graph compression and reordering techniques as part of the Ligra parallel graph processing framework to reduce space usage and improve performance of graph algorithms.

Our goal is to design novel data compression techniques to accelerate popular machine learning algorithms in Big Data and streaming settings.

Data scientists universally report that they spend at least 80% of their time finding data sets of interest, accessing them, cleaning them and assembling them into a unified whole.

Historically, DBMSs in the warehouse space partitioned their data across a shared nothing
cluster.

Wikipedia is one of the most widely accessed encyclopedia sites in the world, including by scientists. Our project aims to investigate just how far Wikipedia’s influence goes in shaping science.

The robot garden provides an aesthetically pleasing educational platform that can visualize computer science concepts and encourage young students to pursue programming and robotics.

We aim to understand theory and applications of diversity-inducing probabilities (and, more generally, "negative dependence") in machine learning, and develop fast algorithms based on their mathematical properties.

Developing state-of-the-art tools that process 3D surfaces and volumes

We are designing new parallel algorithms, optimizations, and frameworks for clustering large-scale graph and geometric data.

Linking probability with geometry to improve the theory and practice of machine learning

Gerrymandering is a direct threat to our democracy, undermining founding principles like equal protection under the law and eroding public confidence in elections.

Predicting the number of clock cycles a processor takes to execute a block of assembly instructions in steady-state (the throughput) is important for both compiler designers and performance engineers.

However, building an analytical model to do so is especially complicated in modern x86-64 Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) machines with sophisticated processor microarchitectures in that it is tedious, error-prone, and must be performed from scratch for each processor generation.

Ithemal is the first tool that learns to predict the throughput of a set of instructions. It does so more accurately than state-of-the-art hand-written tools currently used in compiler backends and static machine code analyzers. In particular, Ithemal has less than half the error of state-of-the-art analytical models (LLVM's llvm-mca and Intel's IACA).

We plan to develop a programming abstraction to enable programmers to write efficient parallel programs to process dynamic graphs.

The Robot Compiler allows non-engineering users to rapidly fabricate customized robots, facilitating the proliferation of robots in everyday life. It thereby marks an important step towards the realization of personal robots that have captured imaginations for decades.

Starling is a scalable query execution engine built on cloud function services that computes at a fine granularity, helping people more easily match workload demand.

A polyhedral compiler for expressing image processing, DNN, and linear/tensor algebra applications

We are developing machine-learning technology to help users efficiently run data queries over large archives of raw video.