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Nilanjana Raychawdhary, a second-year graduate student in computer science and software engineering, or CSSE, has an opportunity to expand existing research ideas through networking and learning from others by earning an invitation to the Computing Research Association- Widening Participating Graduate Cohort for Women, April 20-22 in San Francisco. Attendees have the opportunity to interact with senior female computing-related researchers and professionals who will share pertinent information on graduate school survival skills and personal insights.

By attending the special CRA-WP cohort, I hope to learn about the latest advancements and trends in the field of computer science research, particularly in my area of focus, said Raychawdhary, who will join CSSE classmate and graduate student Prashamsa Pandey at the conference. I would also like to connect with other researchers and experts in the field to expand my network and gain insights into different approaches and methodologies. Ultimately, I hope to bring back new knowledge and perspectives that I can apply to my research and education, helping me to further develop my skills and make meaningful contributions to the field.

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Student in computer science and software engineering awarded ... - Office of Communications and Marketing

The world-renowned researcher and popular computer science professor, described as tireless and compassionate, taught some of the departments most popular courses on artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

Miranda Wollen 10:50 pm, Apr 04, 2023

Staff Reporter

Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science

A prolific force in his field, Dragomir Radev, the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science at Yale, wrote two books and numerous papers on computational linguistics and natural language processing. He died last Wednesday at the age of 54.

Radev led the U.S. team to victory in multiple International Linguistics Olympiads, taught an open course in NLP to over 10,000 students and loved foreign language movies. Radev was also a family man, devoted to his wife Axinia and their two daughters, Laura and Victoria.

I knew Drago as a leader in his community, Jeffrey Brock, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, told the News. He had a love for people and colleagues, and he was much loved in return.

Brock noted that Radevs interests were varied, ranging from automated book summarization to attempts to program humor into natural language processing systems. In addition to background information on his academic work and course offerings, his website includes a list titled My favorite movies, organized by director, country of release, awards, release year and the year Radev first watched them.

Indeed, Sterling Professor of Political Science Alan Gerber 86 agreed that Radev refused to confine himself to a single area of interest or academic field.

He led efforts to connect people working on natural language processing across the university, Gerber wrote in an email to the News. His openness to collaborations across fields was legendary and I believe that he is probably the only computer scientist to win the Gosnell Prize for the best empirical paper of the year in political science.

Radevs website, full of colorful links and featuring a small picture of the smiling professor watching over the page, expressed that same focus on facilitating connection.

My long term goal is to build an infrastructure for computers and humans to interact in a fluent and natural way, Radev wrote in a simple .txt page on the site.

Radev earned his doctorate at Columbia University in 1999, moving on to teach at Michigan before then coming to Yale in 2017. He was awarded fellowships at multiple computer science associations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of Artificial Intelligence. In 2007, he co-founded the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition, a contest for high school students interested in the field.

Brock wrote that Radev believed deeply in the promise of Yale and in its future, and was passionate about leading his community at the University and beyond.

He was tireless and spent long days working with students and carrying out his research, Brock wrote.

Brock added fondly that Radev was a fixture on Hillhouse Avenue, often found tapping excitedly on his phone in communication with students and colleagues. Those same students and colleagues have since gathered online to share memories of Radev on a memorial website.

Collaborators and friends flooded a GoFundMe for Victorias medical expenses with support this past week, writing comments about Radevs kindness, intellect and dedication.

I was chair of Yale CS when we recruited him, wrote professor Joan Feigenbaum on the fundraising site. I often think that my contribution to that recruiting effort might have been the best thing I ever did for Yale CS.

Radev was deeply involved in the department, serving as the director of the Language, Information, and Learning at Yale Lab, the Yale Institute for Network Science and the Wu Tsai Institute for Neuroscience.

Dan Spielman 92, a Sterling Professor of Computer Science at the University, emphasized the hole that Radevs passing would leave in the department and in the field.

From the moment he arrived at Yale he worked hard to improve our course offerings, to teach inspiring courses, and to recruit new faculty, Spielman wrote in an email to the News. He tried to improve every community that he touched we wont be the same without him.

A communal celebration of Radevs life will be held soon, according to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Miranda Wollen covers Faculty and Academics for the News; she also writes very silly pieces for the WKND. She is a sophomore in Silliman College double majoring in English and Classics.

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Dragomir Radev, computer science professor and AI expert, dies at 54 - Yale Daily News

Sometime in 2019, MIT PhD student Ajay Brahmakshatriya formulated a simple, though still quite challenging, goal. He wanted to make it possible for people who had expertise in a particular domain such as climate modeling, bioinformatics, or architecture to write their own programming languages, so-called domain-specific languages (or DSLs), even if they had little or no experience in creating programming languages. A member of the research group headed by MIT Professor Saman Amarasinghe in the Institutes Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Brahmakshatriya wanted these languages to come with all the auxiliary functions people would need to comfortably utilize them, including tools for debugging. This process for getting rid of errors in a piece of software is essential, he and Amarasinghe agreed, as they have called the lack of debugging support the Achilles heel for DSLs.

Its been a productive few years for both of them. In 2021, Brahmakshatriya and Amarasinghe introduced BuildIt, a software package that greatly simplifies the task of creating DSLs. And last month, at an international conference in Montreal co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, the duo introduced D2X, a tool that makes it easy to add debugging to any DSL and has been shown to work particularly well with BuildIt. Their paper on the work even won one of two Distinguished Paper Awards given at the conference.

The main reason for producing a language in a specialized domain, Brahmakshatriya explains, is to promote ease of use. An image-processing DSL, for example, could have a function that says blur the entire image. Issuing that same command in a general-purpose language would require many more lines of code, notes Brahmakshatriya. Thats part of the reason to use a DSL. The other is performance. Because the operations are specific to that domain, they can be more readily optimized carried out in the proper order, and hence completed more efficiently and quickly.

Brahmakshatriya describes BuildIt as a DSL for creating DSLs. It facilitates a multistep procedure for taking an existing, all-purpose programming language and paring it down until it becomes specialized in just the right way. Suppose you have a problem, and you want to write a program to solve it, he says. You could write a program to solve it in its entirety, or you could write a smaller program to solve just the subclass of the problem youre interested in. The more specialized you make the program, the faster it runs. BuildIt is designed to construct DSLs with those guiding principles in mind.

Halide an image processing language invented in 2012, years before BuildIt was around is one of the first DSLs to come out of Amarasinghes group. Its development was led by then-graduate student Jonathan-Ragan Kelley and Andrew Adams, a CSAIL postdoc at the time. Halide is very popular now, and it is used in many Adobe applications, including Photoshop, but it still doesnt have a debugger, Amarasinghe says. The reason for that, he adds, is that debuggers are very complicated. Its very hard to write them, which is why most small DSLs dont have debugging support.

Thats not a desirable state of affairs, according to Brahmakshatriya, who insists that every DSL should have its own debugger. You cant directly use existing debuggers for your new language because they dont understand the domain. Its impossible, moreover, to write a program that is completely correct the first time around, he says. You always start with something that has errors in it, though they often dont show up until much later in the development cycle. If a bug crops up at that point, when you have 5,000 lines of code, it can be very hard to find it. Consequently, once a program is code complete deemed ready for testing by its developers software engineers may then have to devote more than half their time to the arduous chore of debugging.

But help is on the way in the form of D2X (pronounced detox because it relates to the notion of ridding your program of poisons or defects). D2X is not a program, per se, but is instead classified as a library a piece of computer code that can be reused by other programs. It is designed to work with existing debuggers (such as GDB or LLDB), serving as a bridge between those tools and a given DSL. A debugger needs information about the program, or programming language, that is to be cleaned up. Each debugger requires that information in its own particular format, which can be a 400-page document, Amarasinghe says. If you use D2X, you dont have to worry about that. Its taken care of for you.

With D2X serving as the interface, Brahmakshatriya says, your program can be debugged using popular debuggers without any modifications to the debuggers themselves. To his mind, that is the main advantage that comes from combining D2X with BuildIt: If you write a DSL using BuildIt, you dont have to do any extra work. You get a debugger for free, without writing a single extra line of code.

D2X addresses an inherent contradiction in high-performance software head-on, comments Adrian Sampson, an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University. On the one hand, domain-specific languages are our only hope for serious improvements in computing efficiency in the modern era.However, making a new debugger for a new language from scratch is hard, and the absence of a debugger is a rational reason that a programmer might reject a better language in favor of a worse one. The great thing about D2X is that it lowers the barrier to constructing a useful debugger for a DSL.

But thats not the end of the story, so far as Brahmakshatriya is concerned. Another feature hed like to merge with BuildIt, in addition to debugging, is editing, which makes it easier to write a program. Editors, for example, can highlight certain keywords in a document, which can improve its readability. They can perform other functions, such as autocomplete, which automatically fills in text after a small portion is entered.

Brahmakshatriya would like to include profilers along with debuggers and editors as part of the BuildIt platform. Profilers are like debuggers, but instead of helping you find bugs, they let you assess the performance issues in your program, he says. If the program is running slower than expected, you can use a profiler to understand which part of the program is bogging things down. Other useful features could be added in the future, he says.

All of these efforts, Amarasinghe maintains, will make the prospect of creating specialized languages much more attractive. As I see it, theres a huge number of people who support traditional languages thousands of programmers building tools for C, C++, or Java, he says. On the other hand, If I am building a simple DSL, I dont have thousands of programmers to provide all that support. But now, with BuildIt and D2X, he adds, the small guys can get all the things the others get, including debuggers and eventually editors and profilers the same benefits that come with traditional languages. And you can get that without having teams of engineers writing all kinds of complicated code.

This work was supported by the Application Driving Architectures Research Center, the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA), a Joint University Microelectronics Program Center co-sponsored by theSemiconductor Research Corporation and DARPA; the National Science Foundation (NSF); and an Intel/NSF award.

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An easier way to get bugs out of programming languages - MIT News

The intern selection process underscores longstanding inequities in Silicon Valley recruitment and hiring. This year, layoffs and cutbacks at leading tech companies have only narrowed intern opportunities, students say, exacerbating socioeconomic disparities. In response to a callout from The New York Times, nearly 300 people students, recent graduates and software engineers shared their experiences applying for tech internships and jobs, with some describing the process as brutal, unfair or disheartening.

To try to compete, dozens of students spent hours applying for more than 100 internships, practicing for internship coding tests or working on personal coding projects to try to impress recruiters, they said. More than half of the respondents said they had never heard back from the firms where they had applied for positions.

Some students at lesser-known public universities said they felt at a disadvantage compared with their peers at computer science powerhouses like Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. A few students said they had quit part-time jobs or neglected their course assignments to devote themselves to applying for tech internships only to receive no offers.

Some college students at higher-ranked computing programs reported more successful outcomes. Kien Pham, a student at the University of Minnesota, said he had spent much of the summer and fall intensively applying to more than 300 internships.

That included preparing for an interview with Amazon, he said, by spending the better part of two weeks writing down episodes from his life that matched the companys guiding values, known internally as leadership principles. He later accepted a software engineering internship offer from Amazon for this summer.

Some students noted socioeconomic disparities throughout the application process.

Tech companies like Microsoft and Google have internal referral systems in which employees may recommend candidates. Those referrals can help distinguish certain students among tens of thousands of applicants. But students at lesser-known schools often lack the kind of industry, family or elite university connections that can lead to employee referrals.

Another concern, Ms. Farmer said: The intern selection process may overlook or underestimate collegestudents who have jobs.

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For Lower-Income Students, Big Tech Internships Can Be Hard to Get - The New York Times