Awards

Brown University Programming Languages Team (Brown PLT) has had three papers accepted at the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) 2024, one of the most prominent international conferences on programming languages and software engineering. Two of them will receive Distinguished Paper Awards:

• PhD student Kuang-Chen Lu and Brown CS faculty member Shriram Krishnamurthi’s “Identifying and Correcting Programming Language Behavior Misconceptions” presents a curated list of misconceptions about core linguistic concepts like mutable variables and mutable compound data and an instrument to detect them, as well as an automated, self-guided tutoring system that builds on strategies in the education literature and is explicitly designed around identifying and correcting misconceptions.

• Postdoctoral research associate and forthcoming Brown CS faculty member Will Crichton and Shriram’s “Profiling Programming Language Learning” documents a year-long experiment to “profile” the process of learning a programming language: gathering data to understand what makes a language hard to learn and using that data to improve the learning process. Their results demonstrate that quizzes are a simple and useful technique for understanding language learning at all scales.

The two papers were chosen from a pool of 148 accepted papers based on nominations by the Review Committee members, the final review scores, and the review contents.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.