What

PLT is a multi-university group working on advanced programming languages, including language design, formal semantics, computer-aided verification, language implementation, and programming environments. The other leaders of PLT are our friends Matthias Felleisen, Robby Findler and Matthew Flatt.

In addition to working closely with graduate students, we also involve undergraduates in substantial research. If you're interested in joining us, please contact Shriram.

Where

We are part of the computer science department at Brown University, located in lovely Providence, Rhode Island. (How lovely? See some photographs by Richard Benjamin and Sandor Bodo.)

Software

Brown PLT team members contribute to DrScheme and have led the development of other software locally:

• Flapjax, a reactive language for contemporary Web applications
• FrTime, a dynamic dataflow language
• Continue, a conference manager
• Margrave, an analysis tool for access-control policies
• MzTake, a scriptable debugger
• DivaScheme, a speech interface for DrScheme
• XeLda, a unit-checker for Excel spreadsheets

Honors

Our students have earned numerous honors:

• 2007-08: Three students were recognized for Senior Prizes: Aleks Bromfield and Colin Gordon won Senior Prizes, while Jacob Baskin was a runner-up.
• 2007-08: Colin Gordon won an Honorable Mention in the CRA competition
• 2006-07: Leo Meyerovich won an NSF Graduate Fellowship
• 2006-07: Leo Meyerovich won an Honorable Mention in the CRA competition
• 2005-06: Jay McCarthy won an NSF Graduate Fellowship
• 2004-05: Michael Tschantz won an Honorable Mention in the CRA competition
• 2003-04: Dan Licata was one of only eight Finalists in the CRA competition
• 2003-04: Dan Licata won an Honorable Mention in the NSF Graduate Fellowship competition
• 2003-04: David Reiss was chosen as one of seven university Faculty Scholars
• 2002: Greg Cooper won an Honorable Mention in the NSF Graduate Fellowship competition
• 2001-02: Harry Li won an Honorable Mention in the CRA competition
• 2001: Greg Cooper won an Honorable Mention in the NSF Graduate Fellowship competition
• 2001: Rob Hunter won an Honorable Mention in the NSF Graduate Fellowship competition

In addition, several of our papers have been nominated for awards.

Team Members

We have one faculty member, Shriram Krishnamurthi, three PhD students:

• Jay McCarthy (crypto protocol analysis)
• Arjun Guha (Flapjax)
• Chris King (incoming; Flapjax)

two master's students:

• Chris Barratt
• Aleks Bromfield

and several undergraduates, of whom the following are currently active:

• Eric Dobson, Alex Hutter, Sid Jain, Ben Simon

We share an abiding passion for functional programming.

Survivors

Past undergraduates who have completed senior honors theses with us are:

• Jacob Baskin ScB 2008; voting systems for large-scale, sparse voting (proceeded to Google)
• Sam Cunningham ScB 2008; co-advised with Mike Tarr: user-studies on image seaming (proceeded to Goldman Sachs)
• Colin Gordon ScB 2008; typed garbage-collectors (proceeded to Microsoft)
• Michael Greenberg AB 2007; lenses and constraints for Flapjax (proceeded to PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania)
• Leo Meyerovich ScB 2007; Flapjax (proceeded to PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley)
• Michael Carl Tschantz ScB 2005; expressiveness of security policy languages (proceeded to PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University)
• Daniel Licata ScB 2004; verifying interactive Web programs (proceeded to PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University)
• Colin Blundell (mugshot): ScB 2003; co-advised with Kathi Fisler: constraint-based verification of open systems (proceeded to PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania)
• Brock Pytlik ScB 2003; co-advised with Steve Reiss and Manos Renieris: automated fault localization using potential invariants (proceeded to PhD program at Johns Hopkins University)
• Harry Chu-Kie Li (at the 2002 DUG party): ScB 2002; co-advised with Kathi Fisler: modular verification of open systems (proceeded to PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin)
• Lisa Cozzens: AB 2001: teaching biology computationally (proceeded to Microsoft)
• David Goldberg: ScB 2001; co-advised with Manos Renieris: garbage collector effectiveness (proceeded to PhD program at the University of Utah)

Past graduate students who have completed projects with us are:

• Kim Burchett: ScM 2007: optimizing functional reactive programming (proceeded to Goldman Sachs)
• Peter Hopkins: ScM 2005: Continue (proceeded to Google)
• Philip Montgomery: ScM 2005: properties of evolving codebases (proceeded to the Broad Institute at MIT)
• Guillaume Marceau: ScM 2004: dataflow language for debugging (proceeded to Securitas)
• Tudor Antoniu: ScM 2003: finding type and unit errors in spreadsheets (returned to Blunk Microsystems)
• Paul Graunke: PhD 2003, Northeastern University and MS 2001, Rice University; co-advised by Matthias Felleisen: control operators for interactive software (proceeded to FNMOC)
• David Tucker: ScM 2003: aspects in higher-order languages (proceeded to URI)
• Greg Cooper: PhD 2008 and ScM 2002: FrTime
• Rob Hunter: ScM 2002: semantics of garbage collection in OO languages (proceeded to Merced Systems)
• Curran Nachbar (on the Nashua River Rail Trail): ScM 2002: concept analysis for feature detection (proceeded to MIT Lincoln Laboratory)

Other Past Collaborators

Sebastian Benthall, Aleks Bromfield, Spiros Eliopoulos, Josh Gan, Felix Geller (from WPI), David Grabiner, Chris Harris, Dan Ignatoff, Romain Legendre (from ENS), Morgan McGuire, David Reiss, Manos Renieris, Andrey Skylar (from WPI), Danny Yoo (from WPI), Jono Spiro