Overview

POPL 2019 will again host an ACM Student Research Competition, where undergraduate and graduate students can present their original research before a panel of judges and conference attendees. This year’s competition will consist of three rounds:

• Extended abstract round: All students are encouraged to submit an extended abstract outlining their research (up to two pages).

• Poster session at POPL 2019: Based on the abstracts, a panel of judges will select the most promising entrants to participate in a poster session which will take place at the conference. Students who make it to this round will be eligible for up to $500 of travel support to attend the conference. In the poster session, students will have the opportunity to present their work to the judges and conference attendees, who will select three finalists in each category (graduate/undergraduate) to advance to the next round.

• POPL presentation: The last round will consist of an oral presentation at POPL to compete for the final awards in each category. This round will also select an overall winner who will advance to the ACM SRC Grand Finals.

Transport of your poster

You will be responsible for transporting your poster to the conference. If this will be a problem, please contact the chair of the SRC at nvazou@cs.umd.edu.

Prizes

• The top three graduate and the top three undergraduate winners will receive prizes of $500, $300, and $200, respectively.

• All six winners will receive award medals and an one-year complimentary ACM student membership, including a subscription to ACM’s Digital Library.

• The names of the winners will be posted on the SRC web site.

• The first place winners of the SRC will be invited to participate in the ACM SRC Grand Finals, an on-line round of competitions among the winners of other conference-hosted SRCs.

• Grand Finalists and their advisors will be invited to the Annual ACM Awards Banquet for an all-expenses-paid trip, where they will be recognized for their accomplishments along with other prestigious ACM award winners, including the winner of the Turing Award (also known as the Nobel Prize of Computing).

• The top three Grand Finalists will receive an additional $500, $300, and $200. All Grand Finalists will receive Grand Finalist certificates.

• The ACM, Microsoft Research, and our industrial partners provide financial support for students attending the SRC. You can find more information about this on the SRC website (https://src.acm.org/ ).

Eligibility

The SRC is open to both undergraduate (not in a PhD program) and graduate students (in a PhD program). Upon submission, entrants must be enrolled as a student at their universities and be current ACM student members.

Furthermore, there are some constraints on what kind of work may be submitted:

Previously published work: Submissions should consist of original work (not yet accepted for publication). If the work is a continuation of previously published work, the submission should focus on the contribution over what has already been published. We encourage students to see this as an opportunity to get early feedback and exposure for the work they plan to submit to the next POPL.

Collaborative work: Graduate students are encouraged to submit work they have been conducting in collaboration with others, including advisors, internship mentors, or other students. However, graduate submissions are individual, so they must focus on the contributions of the student.

Team submissions: Team projects will be only accepted from undergrads. One person should be designated by the team to make the oral presentation. If a graduate (Masters or PhD program) student is part of a group research project and wishes to participate in an SRC, they can submit and present their individual contribution to the group research project.

Call for Submissions

POPL invites students to participate in the Student Research Competition in order to present their research and get feedback from prominent members of the programming language research community. Please submit your extended abstracts through hotcrp.

Each submission (referred to as “abstract” below) should include the student author’s name and e-mail address; institutional affiliation; research advisor’s name; ACM student member number; category (undergraduate or graduate); research title; and an extended abstract addressing the following:

Problem and Motivation: Clearly state the problem being addressed and explain the reasons for seeking a solution to this problem.

Background and Related Work: Describe the specialized (but pertinent) background necessary to appreciate the work in the context of POPL areas of interest. Include references to the literature where appropriate, and briefly explain where your work departs from that done by others.

Approach and Uniqueness: Describe your approach in addressing the problem and clearly state how your approach is novel.

Results and Contributions: Clearly show how the results of your work contribute to programming language design and implementation in particular and to computer science in general; explain the significance of those results.

Submissions must be original research that is not already published at POPL or another conference or journal. One of the goals of the SRC is to give students feedback on ongoing, unpublished work. Furthermore, the abstract must be authored solely by the student. If the work is collaborative with others and/or part of a larger group project, the abstract should make clear what the student’s role was and should focus on that portion of the work.

Submission guidelines: The extended abstract must not exceed 2 pages of PDF, excluding bibliography, using the SIGPLAN two-column format. The templates for Microsoft Word and LaTeX can be found at the SIGPLAN author information page.

Graduate Posters

• Phantom Contracts for Better Linking, by Daniel Patterson (Northeastern University)
• Parallel Information Flow Control Foundations, by Marco Vassena (Chalmers University of Technology) and Deian Stefan (University of California San Diego)
• Oxide: The Essence of Rust, by Aaron Weiss (Northeastern University)
• Control plane compression for fault tolerance, by Nick Giannarakis (Princeton University)
• Formal Semantics for the DTrace Tracing System, by Domagoj Stolfa (University of Cambridge)
• A Core Calculus for Static Latency Tracking with Placement Types, by Tobias Reinhard (Technische Universität Darmstadt)
• A Trace-Based Proof Technique for Secure Compilation, by Jérémy Thibault (Inria Paris)
• Closure Conversion is Safe for Space, by Zoe Paraskevopoulou (Princeton University)
• Fine-grained Stateful Computations, by Georgy Lukyanov (Newcastle University)
• Gradual Intersection Type Inference, by Pedro Ângelo (Faculdade de Ciências & LIACC, Universidade do Porto) and Mário Florido (Faculdade de Ciências & LIACC, Universidade do Porto)
• Adaptive Effect Handling in Frank, by Lukas Convent (University of Luebeck)
• DPella: A DSL for Privacy-Preserving Queries with Accuracy Guarantees, by Elisabet Lobo-Vesga (Chalmers University of Technology) and Alejandro Russo (Chalmers University of Technology)
• Functions for free!, by Nachiappan Valliappan (Chalmers University)

Undergraduate Posters

• Tailored Termination for Improved Supercompilation, by Ammar Askar (Purdue University)
• Verification of a Cache-optimized Data Structure, by Yixuan Chen (University of Michigan), Aurele Barriere (Ecole Normale Superieure de Rennes), Lennart Beringer (Princeton University), and Andrew W. Appel (Princeton University)
• Formal verification of floating-point number conversion between ASN.1 BER and IEEE 754 binary encodings, by Ilia Zaichuk (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Digamma.ai)