Max Willsey

I’m a third-year Ph.D. student at the University of Washington Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. I work between the PLSE, MISL, and Sampa groups applying programming language techniques to problems in architecture and synthetic biology.

I’m currently working on programming models for microfluidic chips. These architectures promise to make labs-on-a-chip (LoCs) scalable and affordable, but issues like high error rates, resource management, and concurrency make them difficult to program. The Puddle framework aims to provide a safer, easier way to program these devices.

Outside of work, I enjoy running, reading, and crosswords. I (with the help of several others) maintain crossbot, your friendly neighborhood crossword-tracking robot.

News

Nov 7

Our paper on Puddle and PurpleDrop was accepted to ASPLOS 2019. Check out the preprint!

Nov 1

Our poster on Puddle at the Allen School Affiliates program got runner-up for the Madrona Prize.

Oct 25

Our paper on automatically designing accelerators was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems.

May 14

I gave a talk on programming languages and microfluidics at PNW PLSE.

Feb 11

I’ll be giving a talk at the Wild and Crazy Ideas session at ASPLOS 2018. Check out the abstract: Puddle: An Operating System for Microfluidics

2017 Dec

Jared and I will be giving a talk at OBT at POPL 2018. Check out the abstract: Extensible Semantics for Fluidics

2017 Jun

Vincent and I won the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for our proposal on domain specific reconfigurable accelerators. Thanks to our advisors Ras, Luis, and Alvin!

2017 Apr

I’ll be heading to Eugene over the summer for the Oregon Programming Languages Summer School.