Talk: Programming Distributed Systems

LIVE STREAM: https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/97288551655?pwd=aUgvdzg5L3E1SEdid3g4TXdnMUFDdz09

Abstract: Our interconnected world is increasingly reliant on distributed
systems of unprecedented scale, serving applications which must share
state across the globe. And, despite decades of research, we’re still
not sure how to program them!  In this talk, I'll show how to use
ideas from programming languages to make programming at scale easier,
without sacrificing performance, correctness, or expressive power in
the process.  We'll see how slight tweaks to modern imperative
programming languages can provably eliminate common errors due to
replica consistency or concurrency---with little to no programmer
effort.  We'll see how new language designs can unlock new systems
designs, yielding both more comprehensible protocols and better
performance.  And we'll conclude by imagining together the role that a
new cloud-centric programming language could play in the next
generation of distributed programs.

Bio: Mae Milano is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley working at
the intersection of Programming Languages, Distributed Systems, and
Databases.  Her work has appeared at top-tier venues including PLDI,
OOPSLA, POPL, VLDB, and TOCS, and has attracted the attention of the
Swift language team. She is a recipient of the NDSEG Fellowship, and
is a founding member of the Computing Connections Fellowship.