I’m a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. I work mostly in programming languages (PLSE group), but I enjoy collaborating with friends in molecular systems (MISL), and machine learning systems (SAMPL).

I’m currently working on 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.

I’ve also worked on programming models for microfluidic chips. The Puddle framework aims to provide a safer, easier way to program these devices, which promise to make labs-on-a-chip (LoCs) scalable and affordable.

News

• 2020 Oct
  • Our paper on egg will appear at POPL 2021!
• 2020 Jun
  • I’ve been working on this e-graph library called egg for a while. I and my fellow egg-heads put out a paper describing the system and some of its novel ideas.
  • I’m doing a summer internship at OctoML using egg to optimize parts of the TVM compiler stack.
• 2020 Mar
  • Some friends and I wrote a fun paper about synthesizing 3D CAD models. It will appear (virtually!) at PLDI 2020.
• 2019 Dec
  • I passed my generals exam, so I’m now a PhD candidate!
• 2019 Oct
  • I’ll be speaking at a special session on the future of microfludics at ICCAD 2019. You can check out the paper here.
• 2019 Apr
  • I’m very excited to be speaking at the Biochips Summer School at CU Boulder. I’ll be joining a bunch of other exciting speakers to talk about building, programming, and using digital microfluidic devices. Check it out!
  • The Allen School put together a nice news piece on some of our recent work, including our ASPLOS and Nature Communications papers.
• 2019 Mar
  • I’ll be giving two talks at ASPLOS 2019! In the technical track, I’ll talk about Puddle, our new microfluidic programming system. Later in the Wild and Crazy Ideas track, I’ll start a discussion about cloud scale microfluidics.
• 2019 Jan
  • I’m super excited to be co-teaching CSE 351 this quarter with Luis! This course covers the hardware-software interface including C, assembly, virtual memory, caches, and so on.
  • Some folks in the MISL group put together a paper about our vision of a hybrid molecular-electronic computing platform. It’s in the January 2019 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE.

Papers

• egg: Fast and Extensible E-graphs

  • Max Willsey
  • Remy Wang
  • Oliver Flatt
  • Chandrakana Nandi
  • Zach Tatlock
  • Pavel Panchekha
  POPL 2021, July 2020

• 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
  • Zach 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

• Mega-Microfluidics

  • Max Willsey
  • Luis Ceze
  WACI at ASPLOS 2019, 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
  • Kendall Stewart
  • 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

• Extensible Semantics for Fluidics

  • Max Willsey
  • Jared Roesch
  OBT at POPL, January 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