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. Members of the Computer Forum are especially welcome.
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 2026, Fall 2025, Spring 2025, 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.
4/2: From Operational Semantics to Tradeable Coupons
Time: Thursday, April 2, 2026, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: Yuhan Deng
Abstract: Building on our work on Fixpoint, starting from a set of operational semantics, we explore how to materialize facts, both operational ones (e.g. that a handle evaluates to a certain result), and equivalence ones (e.g. two handles are indistinguishable from the perspective of user programs) as coupons that can be combined and reasoned about via a set of trading rules. The goal is to allow untrusted, user-provided scheduler to make scheduling and optimizing decisions, as long as they can achieve the desired coupon.
To show that the set of trades is sound, we model the observational equivalence between handles/objects in Isabelle. We begin with a base coinductive relation, extend it with lemmas that capture nontrivial properties given our modeling of the system, and lift it into an equivalence relation through closure. We then define an inductive relation describing valid coupon trades and prove that it is sound with respect to this equivalence. Finally, we implement the coupon trading component as a WebAssembly program, and show that it faithfully implements the trades using the Isabelle mechanization of Wasm reference interpreter.
Food:
4/9: TBD
Time: Thursday, April 9, 2026, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: Benjamin Driscoll
Abstract: TBD
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4/16: Heuristic Approaches to Hard Combinatorial Optimization on In-Memory Computing Architectures
Time: Thursday, April 16, 2026, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: Alexander Stepanov
Abstract: This talk presents work from the Large-Scale Integrated Photonics team at Hewlett Packard Labs, where the broader research explores in-memory computing accelerators for hard optimization problems like Boolean Satisfiability (SAT). At the core of this work are stochastic local search heuristics, extended to natively handle hybrid XOR-CNF problem structures that arise in domains such as cryptography and AI planning. To overcome the challenge of local minima, we employ parallel tempering with a radical exchange mechanism that enables efficient exploration of complex solution landscapes. These approaches are developed and benchmarked using CountryCrab, a GPU-based hardware simulator that evaluates accelerator performance before hardware fabrication.
Food:
4/23: TBD
Time: Thursday, April 23, 2026, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
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4/30: TBD
Time: Thursday, April 30, 2026, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
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5/7: TBD
Time: Thursday, May 7, 2026, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
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5/14: TBD
Time: Thursday, May 14, 2026, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
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5/21: TBD
Time: Thursday, May 21, 2026, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Food:
5/28: TBD
Time: Thursday, May 28, 2026, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Food:
6/4: TBD (NOTE: Location is CoDa W401)
Time: Thursday, June 4, 2026, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: CoDa E401
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Food: