Yu David Liu

Current Projects

(credit: M. Cohen)		Energy-Aware Programming Languages and Compilers From smartphones to data centers, energy efficiency is increasingly becoming a critical goal of modern computing. This project investigates how energy efficiency can be improved through programming language and compiler techniques. We have designed a novel type system called Energy Types, an energy-aware programming language Ent, a stochastic energy optimizer Aeneas, a novel energy-efficient stream programming and compilation model called Green Streams, an energy-efficient multi-threaded language runtime called Hermes, and some empirical studies on energy behaviors of concurrent programs and energy-aware programmers.
(credit: hypepotamus.com)		Data-Intensive Software Big Data applications are on the rise, with examples such as genome decoding, data warehouse mining, and exascale social network analysis. This project is aimed at providing programming and runtime support to improve the quality and performance of data-intensive applications. Our current efforts include Rate Types to reason about and optimize data stream rates in high-performance data processing, Delta Graphs for update-intensive and verifiable Big Graph applications, GraphQ for scalable out-of-core graph processing, and a new software foundation for generalized lazy data processing.
(credit: binghamton.edu)		Unmanned Aerial Vehicles UAVs are an emerging computing platform increasingly becoming common in our society. This project will develop an open-source and extensible software infrastructure to allow for extensible UAV software design across the computing stack, spanning operating systems (OS), virtual machines (VM), compilers, programming languages, and applications.

Recent Work

• Xiaozhou Liang, John Henry Burns, Joseph Sanchez, Karthik Dantu, Lukasz Ziarek, Yu David Liu, "Understanding Bounding Functions in Safety-Critical UAV Software," ICSE, 2021.
• John Henry Burns, Xiaozhou Liang, Yu David Liu, "Adaptive Variables for Declarative UAV Planning," COP@ECOOP, 2020.
• Timur Babakol, Anthony Canino, Khaled Mahmoud, Rachit Saxena, Yu David Liu, "Calm Energy Accounting for Multithreaded Java Applications," FSE, 2020.
• Jeff Eymer, Philip Dexter, Yu David Liu, "Toward Lazy Evaluation in a Graph Database (short paper)," IC@SPLASH, 2019
• Anthony Canino, Yu David Liu, "Toward a Language Design for Energy Prediction (short paper)," MoreVMs, 2019
• Anthony Canino, Yu David Liu, Hidehiko Masuhara, "Stochastic Energy Optimization for Mobile GPS Applications," FSE, 2018
• Gustavo Pinto, Anthony Canino, Fernando Castor, Guoqing Xu, Yu David Liu, "Understanding and Overcoming Parallelism Bottlenecks in ForkJoin Applications," ASE, 2017
• Anthony Canino, Yu David Liu, "Proactive and Adaptive Energy-Aware Programming with Mixed Typechecking," PLDI, 2017
• Yu David Liu, Lukasz Ziarek, "Toward Energy-Aware Programming for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles," short paper, SEsCPS (affiliated with ICSE), 2017.
• Yuheng Long, Yu David Liu, Hridesh Rajan, "First-Class Effect Reflection for Effect-Guided Programming," OOPSLA, 2016
• Philip Dexter, Yu David Liu, Kenneth Chiu, "Lazy Graph Processing in Haskell,'' Haskell Symposium, 2016.
• Gustavo Pinto, Kenan Liu, Fernando Castor, Yu David Liu, A Comprehensive Study on the Energy Efficiency of Java Thread-Safe Collections," ICSME, 2016.
• Haris Ribic, Yu David Liu, "AEQUITAS: Coordinated Energy Management Across Parallel Applications," International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS), 2016.
• Kai Wang, Guoqing Xu, Zhendong Su, Yu David Liu. "GraphQ: Graph Query Processing with Abstraction Refinement," USENIX ATC, 2015.
• Yuheng Long, Yu David Liu, Hridesh Rajan, "Intensional Effect Polymorphism," ECOOP, 2015.
• Haitao Steve Zhu, Chaoren Lin, Yu David Liu, "A Programming Model for Sustainable Software," ICSE, 2015.
• Kenan Liu, Gustavo Pinto, Yu David Liu, ""Data-Oriented Characterization of Application-Level Energy Optimization," FASE, 2015
• Gustavo Pinto, Fernando Castor, Yu David Liu, "Understanding Energy Behaviors of Thread Management Constructs," OOPSLA, 2014.
• Thomas Bartenstein, Yu David Liu, "Rate Types for Stream Programs," OOPSLA, 2014.
• Gustavo Pinto, Fernando Castor, Yu David Liu, "Mining Questions About Software Energy Consumption," MSR, 2014.
• Haris Ribic, Yu David Liu, "Energy-Efficient Work-Stealing Language Runtimes," ASPLOS, 2014.
• Earlier...

Team

• Timur Babakol (Ph.D.)
• Jack Burns (Ph.D.). Congratulations to Jack, who successfully defended his M.S. thesis in December 2020. Jack will continue as a Ph.D. student.
• Jeffrey Eymer (M.S.). Congratulations to Jeff, who successfully defended his M.S. thesis in December 2020. Jeff will join CapitalOne.
• Kenan Liu (Ph.D.)
• Khaled Mahmoud (Ph.D.)
• Joseph Raskind (M.S.)
• Joe Sanchez (M.S.)
• Alejandro Servetto (B.S.)
• Alex Strong (M.S.)
• Alumni

Teaching

• CS476/576: Programming Models for Emerging Platforms (Fall 2020)
• CS571: Programming Languages, Section I and II (Fall 2019)

Events

• Co-Chair, COP'21
• PC Member, ESOP'21
• Steering Committee Member, VMIL
• Past Events

Fun

• Alan Turing is a "great-grand-uncle'' of mine on the academic genealogy tree.