I’m a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washington, where I also earned my PhD. 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.

Earlier in my PhD, I 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

• 2021 May
  • 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 Jan
  • Our paper applying egg to deep learning graph rewriting will appear at MLSys 2021.
• 2020 Oct
  • Our paper on egg will appear at POPL 2021 as a “Distinguished Paper”!
    Check out the 5 min or 30 min video talks.
• 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

• 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
  • Zach 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
  • 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
  • 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

• 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