Thursday June 21st

GSoC and RustReach Day 39 and Penn

I was working registration from 7:30am to 11am today as a student volunteer. However, we got to sit in on Erik’s talk! His slides were kind of amazing! :D My friend, Sahil, from India, later asked him what software he used to make the drawings, and he said “pen and paper” :D

After the keynote, I ended up eventually hearing from some people that we would be going to UPenn during lunch time. Yess!! I imagined that the walls would have Haskell scribbled all over them!

To be able to go to UPenn. But we got back about ten minutes late, and I had a shift to cover at one of the Ballrooms. However, it was fine, and not a big deal.

We got word that Ranjit had received the Robin Milner Young Researcher Award. Everyone in that room was very happy for him. He really changed my life and it was pivotal meeting him. So I was elated for him. He definitely deserves it, but now I’m worried that everyone will want to go to his school now lol. Haha.

There was a guest-list, and Erik Meijer saw me and said that they should let me in. I told him I had a student volunteer dinner so I couldn’t stay long, but it was enough to have me in a press photo with him, as he was talking to a group :D My friend, Sahil also got in, which was wonderful, because a group was going to Liberty Bell but I couldn’t because I had made plans to the student volunteer dinner. So it all worked out. I am grateful for Erik and his hospitality and for being just a wonderful person.

It was wonderful. We went to “Han’s Dynasty”, and we had planned to order individual Entrees, but we ended up passing around everyone’s entree, and we were all full, and had a blast, and made corny jokes about the spiciness level of food and non determinism lol.
One of the girls was starting a job with Galois in August, also. She said she’d recruit all of us haha. She also had encouraged me earlier to seriously think of attending Penn. If I can get in, I’d also love to attend.

A guy from our group and I decided to go for ice cream. He really did an excellent job of telling me all I needed to know about the PhD process, and what to do and what not to do. He is currently at Cornell, and told me about his journey from Austria, to becoming a Fullbright Scholar, to attending at Cornell. I’m really quite thankful for having met everyone today. I had a great day today. It felt like my people, if I can say that. I really enjoyed everyone’s company.

I fly back around 8pm. It’s going to be sad. But these are my peers and they encourage me.

I am working on Haskell. I have an error right now that I can’t quite debug, but I’m working on it. I’m going to push up code for some of the things I can solve, and get some help early in the AM for other things I can’t solve tomorrow.

I saw this really interesting talk on automated feedback for students using a repair algorithm, where there is a database of correct programmes, so it matches an incorrect programme when a student is learning with the closest correct one. There is a paper on it here. The actual github repo is here. A lot of this research is through Microsoft. It’s about providing feedback for the student that is similar to the way in which they were thinking about a problem. It was fascinating. There were also questions about things like how to detect plagiarism.
I would love such a feedback system for something like learning Lean Proving, or proofs. I suggested that after the talk, when we were talking about it, and they thought it to be an interesting idea internally at Microsoft.

I’ve got Haskell to do. I have a meeting tomorrow at 9am online for RustReach, but I’m also supposed to be on duty for the keynote at 9am to 10:30am. I also have to check-out tomorrow. I plan to do some more Rust when I get in on Saturday. And then Sunday is Haskell.

Written on June 21, 2018