Michael Xing (M.S.)

[mt-xing]

Personal Details

Name: Michael Xing

Undergrad or MEng? M.S.

Year in Cornell: 1st Year, 2nd Semester M.S.

Relevant classes: CS 4120, currently enrolled in CS 6110 and CS 6120

Expertise (languages/frameworks/etc.):

• TypeScript / JavaScript / web dev in general (3+ years professional experience, many more years personal, also wrote 4120 compiler in TS)
• Java (9 semesters on course staff for CS 2110 / CS 2112)
• C++ (some professional experience, also CS 4152 and CS 5625, but all were modern post-2011 C++ w/ smart pointers etc.)

Research

When do you want to do research?

As an M.S. student, I'm interested in doing this as my full research and thesis topic.

What is exciting to you about research?

I worked out in industry for 3 years and while it was fun in its own way, I got antsy and wanted to explore other options. Research and the act of pushing against the boundary of knowledge seems cool when I've spent my career up to this point just using stuff other people discovered and made.

More specifically, I loved taking CS 4120 compilers and want to learn more about the topic of PL and compilers in general.

What kind of research do you want to do?

I'm not entirely sure. The topic of PL theory seems interesting to me but I also didn't get the opportunity to take 4110 as an undergrad and am currently enrolled in 6110, so I suspect I'll need some time before I'm ready to ramp up into hard theory stuff.

I'm happy to do some implementation tasks to start.

Background

Was there a paper that particularly excited you?

I will admit that I haven't read the full paper, but my skim of the paper for Gator stood out to me as particularly interesting. The act of creating smart type systems that can exclude classes of invalid state from even being represented was one of the original things that excited me about the field of PL (specifically when taking 3110 and learning about optionals and variants), and to see it applied to real world applications (as I've written plenty of buggy broken shaders during my time in 5625, mixing up coordinates all the time) feels like exactly the type of thing that drew me to want to do research in this area.

Which of the current research projects would you be interested in working on and why?

The genomics project I discussed w/ Professor Sampson last semester felt like a good fit for me, at least to start: https://capra.cs.cornell.edu/notes/pollen-meng.html

As I ramp up into research, having some more concrete programming tasks would likely play more to my existing strengths. Plus I get an excuse to learn Rust.

Anything else you want to tell us about yourself?

This isn't particularly important, but I'm a huge fan of how powerful TypeScript's type system feels to play with, especially with how widely adopted it is. It feels like so many of the languages with good type systems are almost never used. I wish more popular languages had smarter types.

Attach a CV/Resumé: https://mxi.ng/resumeacademic (this hasn't been updated since I applied to the M.S. program last year, but there weren't any relevant PL courses I could find last semester so it's hopefully still useful)