Kristopher Micinski
@krismicinski
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@[email protected]. Interested in automated reasoning and program analysis. Tweets do not represent anyone's views, especially mine.
Syracuse, NY
Joined February 2011
realizing that my career will be a blunder if I don't learn algebraic topology, i downloaded a book that encompassed all of my knowledge of mathematics by page 8.
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My girlfriend bought me this mug. It’s a thoughtful gift, just not very functional.
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Joke's on them. For $12.80 an hour they could get a PhD student who's done research for years on formal verification of avionics software using relational abstract domains.
"Boeing's 737 MAX software outsourced to $12.80-an-hour engineers"(. You get what you pay for.
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tag yourself: I'm the very far left near the origin.
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this is close, but it's more like this
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mom: "I'm so happy you found a new friend.".me: "to reiterate mom, they're my PhD student.".mom: "still. ".
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Hard to believe all of us fit inside this thing
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Was tryin to figure out this logical symbol before I realized it was a piece of dust
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my favorite way to understand algorithms is by implementing them wrong and realizing I wasted a bunch of time because I was too stubborn to read an explanation of them to begin with.
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@mrloo @ChrisJBakke this comment makes zero sense--these were all internships during school, when there was *no opportunity to hire for a job because the student was in school*.
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@jeanqasaur honestly our mental outlook on things is so profoundly variable by things we have control over that it's amazing to me. Sometimes I get mega lonely and feel like everyone hates me / feel awkward to be around strangers, then hang out with friends and it's all better. Weird.
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@ChShersh Objects that require a lookup to resolve, yes? You can treat them as strings, but doing so just doesn’t give the correct semantics, yeah? There are some other libraries that you can use to compare if you want to treat them only as strings, iirc.
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Struggling to find good coffee and fall in love with a barista?. I finished my PhD in 6.25 years, published five articles, presented at 3-4 conferences, secured $0 in funding, helped 6-8 people learn about coffee and cats, won 0 national awards. I want to help. Send me a message.
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This semester I taught a course on programming language semantics and abstract interpretation. All of the slides are freely available in PDF and Keynote here: I really loved presenting this, and am thankful for the students who worked so hard to learn it.
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LaTeX.Want to write a beautifully-spaced and typeset paragraph, much higher quality than what word generates? Two minutes. Want to change the font? Two hours.
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great advice on studying from this random book i read by Alan U Kennington
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New preprint by our group: we discuss a novel SIMD data structure that allows us to build a new GPU-based Datalog engine with 10x the performance of the best-available CPU-based engines, and lower memory footprint than comparable GPU relational algebras
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My grad student and I have been reading this book and it is the missing piece that neither of us had previously learned
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Congrats to @StarGazerMiao and Shovon for their conditionally-accepted ASPLOS '25 paper. Our system ( demonstrates a SOTA Datalog engine that beats CPU-based competitors by quite a bit (45x vs. CPU Soufflé @ 16th on context-sensitive analysis of postgres)
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really wish I could teach a hard graduate-level data structures course where we cover hamt, qd trees, b trees, fibonacci heaps (generally, amortized structures), bloom filters, etc. and did it all in Rust/C++ where assignments had students profile implementations for cache perf.
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Accepted at VLDB '25, "Datalog with First-Class Facts," we present a massively-parallel Datalog engine geared towards computing over tree-structured data. (. We will post a preprint soon.
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Very enthusiastic to say I'll be moving to Syracuse next year where I'll continue on as an assistant prof at @EngineeringSU. Most of all, I hope that I can be the kind of faculty member I've been lucky enough to have as advisors, colleagues, and friends.
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me: ~39bps.reviewer 2:
One of my favorite scientific findings: . Some languages are very information dense and some less so. Some languages are spoken fast and some slow. And it turns out that people around the world speak at about the same information rate (~39 bps) regardless.
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Our collaboration has received a 5-year NSF PPoSS Large to develop next-generation chain-forward reasoning systems which harmonize novel declarative languages with full-stack implementation approaches for deployment on a variety of heterogeneous backends (GPUs, clusters, etc. ).
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My student Arash Sahebolamri’s paper, “Bring Your Own Data Structures to Datalog,” received a distinguished paper award at OOPSLA ‘23. The paper is here: His impressive Rust-based Datalog engine is available to use right now:
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@mowyourlawn11 @DrAllyLouks Which university resources are you talking about here? Be explicit.
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@littmath @psycholing Call me crazy, but I don’t think I should have to be able to explain myself in depth to someone who has believes in the heart of hearts that they’ve seen evidence that vaccines cause autism.
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@psycholing @littmath No, I don’t think an intelligent layperson believes vaccines cause autism. But the idea that you should be able to explain your research to anyone, even those engaging in bad faith, does not hold up.
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@Mcoorah @RationalEye @Dexerto I mean, having 12 kids from different parents and then being estranged from one because you reject their gender doesn’t seem like an ideal relationship to me, but I guess you just have a low bar for parenthood.
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@someguyspoasts @mowyourlawn11 @DrAllyLouks It is comically asinine. The fact that the best rebuttal that could be mustered was that she was using paper was flat out embarrassing and I figured the speaker had embarrassed themselves enough without me adding to the pain.
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a grad application form is asking me to rate a student's respect for authority and I literally cannot think of something that I would rather see more the OPPOSITE of in my students.
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@jpohank @SaintPel0514 @suchnerve I mean, USPS has a large Amazon contract. It’s not the only one obvious, the logistics chain is very diversified—but I don’t think the assertion that nobody receives anything of value from USPS holds water at all.
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I just got the first round of the moderna covid vaccine!.
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@Mcoorah @RationalEye @Dexerto A father can totally play games and be a good dad. Elon is great at games but a terrible dad, for reasons that are easily googleable.
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These books have helped me understand the process of doing research in programming languages these past few years. Some have helped more than others.
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Hello everyone! In paper-writing breaks over the past few weeks, I've been building these mid-century cabinets. Here are the results :-)
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read this book on a plane last night. Wow, really good stuff--not too deep (many concepts are discussed intuitively, but important concepts like lowenheim skolem are covered substantively), but the writing is very easy to understand.
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Teachers: how do you build a teaching environment where it's okay to be confused? The thing that most frustrates me about students is seeing them shut down the moment they get confused, and I suspect this is because we punish rather than reward them for confusion.
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@mowyourlawn11 @DrAllyLouks I see. Well, I encourage you to take it up with Cambridge, and make sure you vote in the British elections.
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Well hey everyone I bought this house in Syracuse. Now that’s ample truck parking
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@norootcause “As a professional, you may need to draw upon professional experience that cannot easily be taught in classroom without it being a fake approximation. How much a class that pretends to help you with this can help you is left as an exercise to the reader” :-).
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My PhD student Yihao is seeing cool results porting Polonius (portion of Rust borrow checker implemented as Datalog) into our column-oriented GPU-backed engines--seeing surprisingly good results (9s vs. 120s, Ada 6000 vs. 12core threadripper).
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Arash Sahebolamri, my now-graduated PhD student, had his paper “Bring Your Own Data Structures to Datalog” accepted at OOPSLA ‘23. We outline a new approach to integrating user-provided data structures with Datalog embedded DSLs, avoiding the algorithmic follies from encodings.
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My first student, Arash Sahebolamri, passed his PhD proposal today (hoping to defend in several months). He has worked on highly-optimized declarative languages for implementing higher-order program analyses, including Ascent ( and
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when people hear i do computer science the first thing they always ask is what languages i write in and i hate the question so i always just lie and say java because "a combination of Racket and a lot of languages we write ourselves and compile to C++" does not go over so well.
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when you do your PhD in programming languages, one dirty secret is that every school has a room where you can go and talk to people about how writing huge apps in Java with lots of pre-made libraries is actually not so bad and it's actually fun to use a language with a debugger.
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“They laughed at me. Look who’s laughing now” — my dad
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i've been reading a frustrating number of papers where authors (a) claim order-of-magnitude improvements against the state of the art (b) no code is available, (c) authors do not respond to my emails. What's the deal? Some of these are papers at very top venues.
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Found the video of my talk from yesterday, "High-Performance Logic Programming on Servers, Clusters, and GPUs."
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@craigzLiszt I agree with you. I don’t see AI as useless, I see it as speculatively capitalized. It’s very obviously useful, just also quite a bubble for now.
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Check it out! A scalable open source pointer analysis of LLVM written using one of our macro based datalog engines (embedded in Rust) that scales well up to roughly ~16 threads; we were able to complete a 1-cfa of httpd with billions of control flow points!.
We are pleased to announce that Galois is open-sourcing Yapall (Yet Another Pointer Analysis for LLVM), a static pointer analysis tool for programming languages that compile to LLVM.
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after 2+ years working on a particular research project, we got some super exciting initial results today at scale. Feels pretty good after months and months of disappointment after running experiments. .
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What ideas in computer science did everyone think were good at the time but ultimately ended up being complete hot air, leaving us feeling embarrassed how much time we wasted, destined to failure as the tides of change moved on?.
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watched a great end-to-end discussion of how to build a compiler to x86 for let+primitive integer arithmetic. Very cool ideas, I tried a nanopass-style course and it definitely had a serious issue of needing to get to the end to get the ideas.
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On talks: nobody cares at all if your talk is a bit short, but they *really* care if your talk is a bit long.
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You miss one wedding and this is what happens (talking to my mom)
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The “modern deduction” blog (how modern logic programming compilers work, roughly) is happening. Working on the first articles now. Hoping to start releasing 1-2 a month over the rest of the semester.
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The preprint of our ASPLOS '25 paper, "Optimizing Datalog for the GPU," is here:
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basically my dating strategy now is to hang out in this teahouse writing latex and racket until I meet the love of my life.
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sad, our paper on GDLog was rejected (2weak reject/2weak accept) with "The main innovation of the paper is the Hash-Indexed Sorted Array (HISA) but this is neither a deep nor novel technical improvement." But we still think it's cool, and you should too!
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Modern Deduction Post 1: Datalog, Chain-Forward Computation, and Relational Algebra.
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A good way to explain a PhD to people is like--remember that time when you were a kid and there was that kid that was so into pokemon that they kinda missed the point of just having fun with it and instead learned all the technical rules? If you were that kid you got a PhD.
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unpopular opinion: computer science degrees shouldn't exist. It should be a specialization within mathematics.
Unpopular opinion: cyber security degrees shouldn't exist. It should be a specialisation within computer science.
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The best software engineers I know gravitate towards running a farm.
Sorry for sounding elitist, but all the best software engineers I come across end up gravitating towards FP. It often takes them years as a gradual process, but FP solves many problems that OOP struggles with. I wish FP people would stop with the math and category theory though.
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@landg_usa @gertner_alex I'm just here for the ratio: your crap attempt to cover your asses just adds to the fact that you have no serious credibility.
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Writing grants isn’t real research. Real research is going to the store to buy a usb drive because you can’t install anything on your Linux distro as your package management system is in a broken state so you have to reinstall everything.
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Rejected for the Nth time in several years, I’m eager to point you at one of our new systems, which we’re quite excited about. Irrelevant BS, or novel stuff? You can decide :-D
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A student mentioned to me they were at a conference on SAT/SMT and asking why everyone still was forking MiniSAT. That paper is one of the most clear descriptions of an algorithm I’ve ever read, and the design choices are so thoughtfully simple it’s hard not to love it.
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Congrats to Yihao Sun (@StarGazerMiao) on his AAAI '25 paper (his fourth paper this term!). We present our latest GPU Datalog engine, which beats a SOTA CPU-based system by up to 250x, and our previously-SOTA GPU Datalog (ASPLOS '25) by 2.5x. Code is here:
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Just learned about self-verifying theories, which are first-order systems which are powerful enough to reason about their own consistency without enabling the diagonalization argument by—I’m not joking—defining addition and multiplication in terms of subtraction and division.
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Teaching “formal methods in security” this fall at SU! Super excited for this. First half of course is foundational FM grad class (projects like cegar and predicate abstraction) and second half is formative papers (e.g., volpano smith, hyperproperties, etc. ). Really psyched!.
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was feeling bad about my research skills so i made apple crisp. it worked. now i feel bad about my baking skills too.
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@soniagupta504 @vbhvsgr I both totally agree w/ you and also feel like the medical field has been held up as elite because of gatekeeper bullshit. While you don't see bootcamps for doctors, you do see a huge rise in the number of PAs and nurses, and this is probably a good analogue for coding bootcamps.
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Arash Sahebolamri, my first PhD student, has scheduled his defense! May 23! His work delivers orders-of-magnitude expressivity and scalability improvements to logic programming, focused on static analyses.
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Great time to announce that I am planning to start releasing my “modern deduction” blog articles on modern program analysis (in Datalog, etc. ) soon. Been using the last few weeks to brainstorm and write snippets of code.
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junior faculty academia. 20% teaching.20% research.10% service.50% justifying to yourself why you didn't apply to the CAREER award this year.
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controversial opinion(?): pure functional programming still uses state, it's just that that state is reified via the stack and it is often the case that the stack's natural matching call-return structure makes it radically easier to write algorithms correctly.
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I borrowed this book from my advisor during my PhD, who claimed he was not able to understand it. After reading some of it, I understood what he meant.
Proofs and Types, a great primer by Girard on both proof theory and type theory, made publicly available on Taylor's website. This book covers natural deductions, the Curry-Howard correspondence, normalization, Godel system Tand much more. Link in the comments
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this transparent slide + OBS gimmick is my second-favorite thing this year so far.
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I'm teaching my online course in programming languages here again at SU. The course is all on YouTube, with a tentative playlist here:
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i've been avoiding mexican restaurants because of this "chip shortage" i keep hearing about but today someone told me it was actually computer chips and this changes everything.
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i never thought that verified compilers would really be life saving. Then I watched a youtube video on a guy who wrote a compiler that generates instructions to drive a CNC machine to which he attached a chainsaw to carve bears out of wood.
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Not gonna lie, everything in 2020 has definitely strengthened my resolve to leave the US and live in a medieval Italian village. I was kinda-joking about it at the beginning of 2020, but now I'm like kinda-serious.
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Interested in writing interpreters that you debug by rendering their derivations in LaTeX? Read my blog post "Certifying Interpreters in Racket"
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@cathasach4bikes @craigzLiszt Lots of absolute morons speak concisely, eloquently, and convince others that they’re deeply insightful while they’re just spouting BS that sounds like insight.
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My first master's student, Jeffrey Ching, passed his thesis today on some work we've been doing to visualize the results of binary analyses (.
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I'm up against a uni printing quota, so literally cannot print exams for Thursday, and university IT wants me to *pay* them, so I connected them with my budget person to try to pay from my startup but noted the absurdity of a faculty member having to pay to print their own exams.
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Celebrated a paper submission by cleaning my apartment for >10 hours. Is this adulthood? Wait, no. That would be cleaning my apartment all the time. Okay, false alarm everyone.
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