Add PLDI 2023 summary

_posts/2023-07-16-pldi-2023.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "PLDI 2023"
+---
+
+![PLDI 2023 logo](https://pldi23.sigplan.org/getImage/orig/pldi-logo-alligator-02.png){: style="float: left; width: 13%; padding: 1%"}
+I was long overdue to attend a conference in person: the last conference I attended was [POPL 2020](https://popl20.sigplan.org/).
+This year's [PLDI](https://pldi23.sigplan.org/) was in Orlando, Florida at the height of a hot, humid summer in the largest conference
+center I have ever seen (we did a lot of walking within the conference center).
+PLDI was co-located with other conferences including
+the hardware conference ISCA as part of the [Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC)](https://fcrc.acm.org/)
+and I dropped in on a few of the ISCA talks.
+
+There were two tracks so I didn't attend all the talks but some of the themes in the talks I did attend were
+as follows (there were lots of other great papers in [the program](https://pldi23.sigplan.org/program/program-pldi-2023/)).
+
+- Sparse matrix multiply,
+  Tensors,
+  Transformers
+  and Machine learning.
+  In particular, ways of generating and combining high performance implementations.
+  [bansal:pldi:2023]
+  [kovach:pldi:2023]
+
+- Formally verified software,
+  and fast crypto implementations
+  [kuepper:pldi:2023]
+
+- Extending and using SMT solvers
+  [wang:pldi:2023]
+
+- Quantum computing
+  [chen:pldi:2023]
+
+- Undefined Behaviour in C
+  [isemann:pldi:2023]
+
+- Fuzzing and testing
+  [livinskii:pldi:2023]
+
+- Information leakage,
+  non-interference
+  and Approximate model counting
+  [saha:pldi:2023]
+  [eilers:pldi:2023]
+
+- Memory management,
+  and parallelism
+  [arora:pldi:2023]
+
+- Defunctionalization
+  [brandon:pldi:2023]
+
+- Synthesis
+  [guria:pldi:2023]
+
+- Separation logic
+  [liu:pldi:2023]
+
+- Type systems
+  [nigam:pldi:2023]
+
+In other words, [this is still PLDI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVMCl64Uhe8).
+
+
+One of the most interesting talks was about a type system inspired by incorrectness logic used to reason
+about whether a random test generator was theoretically capable of generating all possible input values
+[zhou:pldi:2023].
+Just as incorrectness logic turns Hoare logic on its head, so their type system turns normal typing
+rules on their head.
+
+
+And I dropped in on my colleague Sam Coward's E-graphs talk about his extensions to E-graphs to support
+the use of egg to generate efficient floating point hardware. (See [coward:arxiv:2023] for
+the related paper.)
+
+I also enjoyed the Plenary Talks I attended
+
+- "Computing in the foundation model era"
+  by Kunle Olukotun, Stanford University
+  [link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gADw3NtGDVE&list=PLn0nrSd4xjjZ5DcBqu8xxoFQ3QjqAaQXl&index=1)
+
+  This was about designing hardware for constructing large language models and how his students'
+  research has fed into a startup that is creating chips (and racks) for machine learning.
+
+- "Constructing & deconstructing trust: Employing cryptographic recipe in the ML domain"
+  by Shafi Goldwasser, University of California Berkeley
+  [link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHinDYWpZDQ&list=PLn0nrSd4xjjZ5DcBqu8xxoFQ3QjqAaQXl&index=4)
+
+  This was about taking all the understanding of threat models, attacks, etc. developed
+  by the cryptographic community and using that
+  to think about the known attacks and potential vulnerabilities in the creation and use of
+  machine learning models.
+
+But, really, I went to catch up with colleagues that I had not seen for several years;
+to meet researchers whose work I knew but had never met;
+and for the random meetings, dinners and introductions that happen in the "corridor track".
+
+[arora:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/arora:pldi:2023
+[bansal:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/bansal:pldi:2023
+[brandon:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/brandon:pldi:2023
+[chen:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/chen:pldi:2023
+[coward:arxiv:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/coward:arxiv:2023/
+[eilers:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/eilers:pldi:2023
+[guria:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/guria:pldi:2023
+[isemann:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/isemann:pldi:2023
+[kovach:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/kovach:pldi:2023
+[kuepper:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/kuepper:pldi:2023
+[liu:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/liu:pldi:2023
+[livinskii:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/livinskii:pldi:2023
+[nigam:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/nigam:pldi:2023
+[saha:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/saha:pldi:2023
+[wang:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/wang:pldi:2023
+[zhou:pldi:2023]: {{site.baseurl}}/RelatedWork/papers/zhou:pldi:2023
+