Laura Effinger-Dean

I'm a second-year graduate student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

Office: CSE 394
Email: effinger AT cs.washington.edu

I am a member of the Washington Advanced Systems for Programming research group. Go visit our website here.

I will be an intern in the Google Fremont office summer 2008!

I am currently working with Dan Grossman and Matt Kehrt on Transactional Events for Ocaml, an extension of Fluet and Donnelly's work on Transactional Events for Haskell. Our approach allows threads to modify the heap while executing a transactional event.  We submitted this work to ICFP '08; you can find our submission and supporting materials here.

Recently, I developed an Eclipse plugin called AtomEclipse. Intended for educational purposes, the plugin lets programmers add atomic blocks in Java code, using Eclipse's debug mode to suspend other threads when a thread is executing atomically. The plugin was used in a November 2007 lecture for a University of Washington course. I was advised by Dan Grossman on this project.

Prior to UW, I worked on a variety of projects, including:

  • Adding static friction and plasticity to simulations of deformable objects (RIPS 2006; sponsored by Pixar)
  • The empire problem in Penrose tilings (my senior thesis at Williams; advised by Duane Bailey; PDF).
  • Garbage collection for complex data structures (Harvey Mudd Computer Science REU 2005; advised by Melissa O'Neill). We presented our work at SPACE 2006.
  • Improving the portability of the dynamic load balancer DRUM (advised by Jim Teresco). This work was published in ICCS '05 (PDF).

I graduated from Williams College in 2006.

You can view my current schedule here.

Assorted links: The NEW, award-winning* CSE Band, The Elizabethans (my a cappella group while at Williams), my LiveJournal (mostly friends-only), the Seattle Buffy Meetup Group, PHD Comics.

*TGIF champions, Spring 2008