Title: Programming Distributed Systems
Date: March 13, 2024
Duration: 1 HR

SPEAKER
Mae Milano
Assistant Professor, Princeton University
Mae Milano is an assistant professor at Princeton University, working at the intersection of Programming Languages, Distributed Systems, and Databases.  Her work has appeared at toptier academic venues and has attracted the attention of the Swift language team. She is a recipient of the NDSEG Fellowship, has won several awards for her writing and service, and is a founding member of the Computing Connections Fellowship's selection committee.

MODERATOR
Ethan Cecchetti
Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin
Ethan Cecchetti an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and a member of the MadS&P and madPL groups. His research uses programming languages and applied cryptographic techniques to design secure systems and build tools to ease their development and analysis. Ethan holds a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics – Computer Science from Brown University and a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University. He was also a software engineer at TripAdvisor from 2012 – 2015, where he worked on backend infrastructure.

ABSTRACT
Our interconnected world is increasingly reliant on distributed systems of unprecedented scale, serving applications which must share state across the globe. And, despite decades of research, we're still not sure how to program them! In this talk, I'll show how to use ideas from programming languages to make programming at scale easier, without sacrificing performance, correctness, or expressive power in the process. We'll see how slight tweaks to modern imperative programming languages can provably eliminate common errors due to replica consistency or concurrency—with little to no programmer effort. We'll see how new language designs can unlock new systems designs, yielding both more comprehensible protocols and better performance.