I’m an (incoming) Assistant Professor in EECS at UC Berkeley. I am recruiting PhD students this application cycle to start in Fall 2024. Please apply here.

My research aims to make program optimization more robust, powerful, and accessible. Along the way, we use techniques from programming languages, databases, and systems. My current focus is egg, a toolkit for program optimization and synthesis powered by e-graphs and equality saturation. We’ve applied it to some really fun domains like improving floating point accuracy, shrinking 3D models, and linear algebra optimization.

During my PhD and postdoc at the University of Washington, I worked mostly in programming languages (PLSE group). I also enjoyed collaborating with friends in molecular systems (MISL), where I worked on programming models for microfluidic chips.

News

• 2023.06

  I’ve accepted an Assistant Professor position at EECS at UC Berkeley. I’ll start in 2024.

• 2023.06

  The second EGRAPHS workshop, EGRAPHS 2023, will take place at PLDI 2023 in Orlando!

• 2023.04

  Our work connecting egg to Datalog will appear at PLDI 2023.

• 2023.01

  Our paper unifying traditional hash joins with worst-case optimal joins will appear at SIGMOD ‘23.

• 2023.01

  Our POPL 2023 paper shows how to use e-graph anti-unification to learn library functions from a body of code.

• 2022.01

  The inaugural EGRAPHS workshop at PLDI 2022 was a big hit!

• 2021.10

  Our paper on inferring rewrites using equality saturation was a Distinguished Paper at OOPSLA 2021.

• 2021.09

  Our paper connecting e-matching to relational databases was (conditionally) accepted to POPL 2022.

• 2021.05

  I defended my PhD! You can find my thesis here. I’ll be staying on as a postdoc to work on egg and related projects.

• 2021.04

  I wrote a post on the SIGPLAN blog about egg.

• 2021.01

  Our paper applying egg to deep learning graph rewriting will appear at MLSys 2021.

• 2020.10

  Our paper on egg will appear at POPL 2021 as a Distinguished Paper!
  Check out the 5 min or 30 min video talks.

Papers

• Equality Saturation Theory Exploration à la Carte

  • Anjali Pal
  • Brett Saiki
  • Ryan Tjoa
  • Cynthia Richey
  • Amy Zhu
  • Oliver Flatt
  • Max Willsey
  • Zachary Tatlock
  • Chandrakana Nandi
  OOPSLA 2023, October 2023

• Better Together: Unifying Datalog and Equality Saturation

  • Yihong Zhang
  • Remy Wang
  • Oliver Flatt
  • David Cao
  • Philip Zucker
  • Eli Rosenthal
  • Zachary Tatlock
  • Max Willsey
  PLDI 2023, June 2023

• Free Join: Unifying Worst-Case Optimal and Traditional Joins

  • Remy Wang
  • Max Willsey
  • Dan Suciu
  SIGMOD 2023, January 2023

• babble: Learning Better Abstractions with E-Graphs and Anti-Unification

  • David Cao
  • Rose Kunkel
  • Chandrakana Nandi
  • Max Willsey
  • Zachary Tatlock
  • Nadia Polikarpova
  POPL 2023, January 2023

• Small Proofs from Congruence Closure

  • Oliver Flatt
  • Sam Coward
  • Max Willsey
  • Zachary Tatlock
  • Pavel Panchekha
  FMCAD 2022, September 2022

• Virtualizing Existing Fluidic Programs

  • Caleb Winston
  • Max Willsey
  • Luis Ceze
  ACM JETC, August 2022

• Co-Optimization of Design and Fabrication Plans for Carpentry

  • Haisen Zhao
  • Max Willsey
  • Amy Zhu
  • Chandrakana Nandi
  • Zachary Tatlock
  • Justin Solomon
  • Adriana Schulz
  ACM TOG, March 2022

• Relational E-Matching

  • Yihong Zhang
  • Remy Wang
  • Max Willsey
  • Zachary Tatlock
  POPL 2022, January 2022

• Rewrite Rule Inference Using Equality Saturation

  • Chandrakana Nandi
  • Max Willsey
  • Amy Zhu
  • Remy Wang
  • Brett Saiki
  • Adam Anderson
  • Adriana Schulz
  • Dan Grossman
  • Zachary Tatlock
  OOPSLA 2021, August 2021
  Distinguished Paper

• Equality Saturation for Tensor Graph Superoptimization

  • Yichen Yang
  • Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana
  • Remy Wang
  • Max Willsey
  • Sudip Roy
  • Jacques Pienaar
  MLSys 2021, January 2021

• egg: Fast and Extensible E-graphs

  • Max Willsey
  • Remy Wang
  • Oliver Flatt
  • Chandrakana Nandi
  • Zachary Tatlock
  • Pavel Panchekha
  POPL 2021, January 2021
  Distinguished Paper

• PurpleDrop: A Digital Microfluidics-based Platform for Hybrid Molecular-Electronics Applications

  • Ashley Stephenson
  • Max Willsey
  • Jeff McBride
  • Sharon Newman
  • Bichlien Nguyen
  • Chris Takahashi
  • Karin Strauss
  • Luis Ceze
  IEEE Micro 2020, July 2020

• Synthesizing Structured CAD Models with Equality Saturation and Inverse Transformations

  • Chandrakana Nandi
  • Max Willsey
  • Adam Anderson
  • James Wilcox
  • Eva Darulova
  • Dan Grossman
  • Zachary Tatlock
  PLDI 2020, March 2020

• Scaling Microfluidics to Complex, Dynamic Protocols

  • Max Willsey
  • Ashley Stephenson
  • Chris Takahashi
  • Bichlien Nguyen
  • Karin Strauss
  • Luis Ceze
  ICCAD 2019, November 2019
  Invited Paper

• High Density DNA Data Storage Library via Dehydration with Digital Microfluidic Retrieval

  • Sharon Newman
  • Ashley Stephenson
  • Max Willsey
  • Bichlien Nguyen
  • Chris Takahashi
  • Karin Strauss
  • Luis Ceze
  Nature Communications, April 2019

• Puddle: A Dynamic, Error-Correcting, Full-Stack Microfluidics Platform

  • Max Willsey
  • Ashley Stephenson
  • Chris Takahashi
  • Pranav Vaid
  • Bichlien Nguyen
  • Michal Piszczek
  • Christine Betts
  • Sharon Newman
  • Sarang Joshi
  • Karin Strauss
  • Luis Ceze
  ASPLOS 2019, April 2019

• DNA Data Storage and Hybrid Molecular–Electronic Computing

  • Douglas Carmean
  • Luis Ceze
  • Georg Seelig
  • Callie Bee
  • Karin Strauss
  • Max Willsey
  Proceedings of the IEEE, January 2019
  Invited paper

• Iterative Search for Reconfigurable Accelerator Blocks with a Compiler in the Loop

  • Max Willsey
  • Vincent Lee
  • Alvin Cheung
  • Ras Bodik
  • Luis Ceze
  IEEE TCAD, October 2018

• Design and Implementation of Concurrent C0

  • Max Willsey
  • Rokhini Prabhu
  • Frank Pfenning
  Fourth International Workshop on Linearity, June 2016

• Design and Implementation of Concurrent C0

  • Max Willsey
  Senior Honors Thesis, May 2016
  Designated as Exemplary Thesis by the senior thesis award committee