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

Mar 18

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.

Jan 5

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.

Jan 1

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.

2018 Nov

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

2018 Nov

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

2018 Oct

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

2018 May

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

2018 Feb

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.