Hi! I’m Mae! I’m a postdoc at University of California, Berkeley, and an incoming assistant professor at Princeton University!

In 2020 I graduated with a PhD in programming languages and systems from Cornell University, advised by Andrew Myers. My work focuses on programming languages and abstractions for wide-area or large-scale distributed systems; really anything where the round-trip latency for communication is way too long, or the cost of coordination is way too high. I’m working on programming the Hydro project with Joe Hellerstein, and leading an initiative to design new languages for fearless concurrency. During my PhD, I worked on programming replicated, distributed systems with Andrew Myers, and have also worked extensively with Ken Birman and the Derecho group.

• NDSEG Fellowship (2015)
• NSF GRFP Honorable Mention (2015)
• Cornell CS Department Service Award (multiple, latest 2020)
• Senior Prize in Computer Science (2013)
• Rose Rosengard Subotnik Prize (2012)

CS 294-170: Graduate Seminar: Programming the Cloud

The public clouds are the most powerful general-purpose computers ever assembled, allowing individuals to rent their power at unlimited scale, on demand. This makes “the cloud” the biggest game-changer in computing access since the adoption of the PDP-11 minicomputer in the early 1970s. However, unlike the advent of UNIX and C for PDP-11, an organic programming model has yet to emerge for the cloud. History suggests that the real innovation on new platforms comes when the right programming model is introduced.

The challenge of helping developers program the cloud spans areas: Programming Languages, Distributed Systems, Databases, and Operating Systems, to name a few. In this seminar we will read research papers together, and bootstrap new efforts in this area.

CS 2043: Unix Tools and Systems

UNIX and UNIX-like systems are increasingly being used on personal computers, mobile phones, web servers, and many other systems. They represent a wonderful family of programming environments useful both to computer scientists and to people in many other fields, such as computational biology and computational linguistics, in which data is naturally represented by strings. This course takes students from shell basics and piping, to regular-expression processing tools, to shell scripting and Python. Other topics to be covered include handling concurrent and remote resources, manipulating streams and files, and managing software installations.

CS195r: Compilers

Compilers are a subject fundamental to Computer Science, helping bridge the gap between a program’s abstract semantics and the target machine’s capabilities. In this course, we follow Andrew Appel’s curriculum to design and build a compiler from scratch, in a radically collaborative and open-ended environment.

Professional Service

• Artifact Evaluation Committee: OOPSLA ‘15, POPL ‘17, PLDI ‘19, OOPSLA ‘23

• Program Committee: PaPoC ‘22, EuroDW ‘21, ‘22

• External Review Committee: OOPSLA ‘23

Outreach

• CCF: Member of the selection committee
• *SIGPLAN-M: Mentor since 2020

• SPLASH (2013,15-16): Instructor at SPLASH Cornell and MIT, lecturing on video game music

• EYH (2014-19): Workshop leader and designer at Expanding Your Horizons, a one-day workshop aimed at encouraging middle school girls to embrace STEM topics.

• Elementary School Instructor (2014): Instructor of a day-a-week course following the CodeAcademy curriculum in Belle Sherman Elementary School in Ithaca.