The Stanford Software Research Lunch is a weekly event on Thursday where students and researchers present their latest work to peers. Talks are open to anybody, but regular attendees are expected to give a presentation on their work.
Mailing list: software-research-lunch@lists.stanford.edu (subscribe via mailman)
Calendar: ical
Format: The lunch is held every week during fall, winter and spring quarter. The first week of every quarter is an organizational lunch where people can sign up to give a talk. If you'd like to give a talk, please contact Rohan Yadav.
Past quarters: Winter 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Winter 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Winter 2023, Fall 2022, Winter 2021, Fall 2020, Winter 2020, Fall 2019, Spring 2019, Winter 2019, Fall 2018, Spring 2018, Winter 2018, Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Winter 2017, Fall 2016.
Ordering Food: For suggestions for those ordering food for the lunch, see here.
4/3: Optimizing DNN Training with SP-ization
Time: Thursday, April 3, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: Colin Unger
Abstract: Abstract redacted due to in-progress work.
Food:
4/10: Compilation of Modular and General Sparse Workspaces
Time: Thursday, April 10, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: Genghan Zhang
Abstract: Recent years have seen considerable work on compiling sparse tensor algebra expressions. This paper addresses a shortcoming in that work, namely how to generate efficient code (in time and space) that scatters values into a sparse result tensor. We address this shortcoming through a compiler design that generates code that uses sparse intermediate tensors (sparse workspaces) as efficient adapters between compute code that scatters and result tensors that do not support random insertion. Our compiler automatically detects sparse scattering behavior in tensor expressions and inserts necessary intermediate workspace tensors. We present an algorithm template for workspace insertion that is the backbone of our code generation algorithm. Our algorithm template is modular by design, supporting sparse workspaces that span multiple user-defined implementations. Our evaluation shows that sparse workspaces can be up to 27.12× faster than the dense workspaces of prior work. On the other hand, dense workspaces can be up to 7.58× faster than the sparse workspaces generated by our compiler in other situations, which motivates our compiler design that supports both. Our compiler produces sequential code that is competitive with hand-optimized linear and tensor algebra libraries on the expressions they support, but that generalizes to any other expression. Sparse workspaces are also more memory efficient than dense workspaces as they compress away zeros. This compression can asymptotically decrease memory usage, enabling tensor computations on data that would otherwise run out of memory. This work was published on PLDI 2024 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3656426.
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4/17: AI in Software Engineering at Google
Time: Thursday, April 17, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: Satish Chandra
Abstract: In this talk, I’ll give an overview of how at Google we have been working on weaving AI capabilities in internal developer workflows to improve productivity over the past few years. The talk will cover not just the features as they exist currently, but importantly, our journey through improving them iteratively based on model improvements and user feedback. I will then describe some of the recent work we have done in using agentic AI techniques for automatically fixing bugs. I’ll talk about our eval curation strategy, highlighting differences that we see from the popular SWE Bench. I'll talk about our continuing journey through making automatic bug fixing work for real-world enterprise use, and the challenges we face in this task. I'll conclude with some comments on evals for coding tasks in general.
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4/24: Literate Tracing
Time: Thursday, April 24, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: Matthew Sotoudeh
Abstract: Literate tracing is a software documentation style that emphasizes interactive visualizations of concrete program traces. After explaining some pros and cons of literate tracing, we'll describe a new tool, TReX, that makes writing literate traces easier.
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5/1: TBD
Time: Thursday, May 1, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: David Zhang
Abstract: TBD
Food:
5/8: TBD
Time: Thursday, May 8, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker:
Abstract: TBD
Food:
5/15: TBD
Time: Thursday, May 15, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: Simon Guo and Anne Ouyang
Food:
5/22: TBD
Time: Thursday, May 22, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Food:
5/29: Automated Verification of Monotonic Data Structure Traversals in C
Time: Thursday, May 29, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: Matthew Sotoudeh
Abstract: Bespoke data structure operations are common in real-world C code. We identify one common subclass, monotonic data structure traversals (MDSTs), that iterate monotonically through the structure. For example, strlen iterates from start to end of a character array until a null byte is found, and a binary search tree insert iterates from the tree root towards a leaf. We describe a new automated verification tool, Shrinker, to verify MDSTs written in C. Shrinker uses a new program analysis strategy called scapegoating size descent, which is designed to take advantage of the fact that many MDSTs produce very similar traces when executed on an input (e.g., some large list) as when executed on a ‘shrunk’ version of the input (e.g., the same list but with its first element deleted). We introduce a new benchmark set containing over one hundred instances proving correctness, equivalence, and memory safety properties of dozens of MDSTs found in major C codebases including Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, QEMU, Git, and Musl. Shrinker significantly increases the number of monotonic string and list traversals that can be verified vs. a portfolio of state-of-the-art tools.
This is a practice talk, so feedback is very much appreciated!
Food:
6/5: TBD
Time: Thursday, June 5, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Food: