Lindsey Kuper

Lindsey Kuper

Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering Department
Baskin School of Engineering
University of California, Santa Cruz

Ph.D., 2015
Indiana University

lkuper@ucsc.edu

CV · Blog · GitHub · Mastodon · YouTube

"Permit yourself to open a book and start reading from anywhere." — Manuel Blum

🏰  Research overview

My work draws on the research traditions of programming languages, distributed systems, and software verification. I work on programming-language-based approaches to building concurrent and distributed software systems that are correct and efficient. The unifying principle and goal of my work is to use high-level abstractions to express software systems in a way that not only does not compromise performance, but actually enables it. Lately, my research group has been investigating choreographic programming, bugs in serverless runtime systems, and solver-aided tools for building trustworthy distributed systems.

Our research has been supported by an NSF CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and a gift from Amazon Web Services. Special thanks to Zulip for a generous in-kind sponsorship, too!

The current members of my group are Jonathan Castello (PhD), Tim Goodwin (PhD, co-advised with Andrew Quinn), Shun Kashiwa (MS), Nathan Liittschwager (PhD), Patrick Redmond (PhD), and Gan Shen (PhD). Together, we're the CASL group, which is part of the larger Languages, Systems, and Data (LSD) Lab. Our name is pronounced like "castle" and symbolizes strength, safety, longevity, and a bit of magic and whimsy.

πŸ‘©πŸ»β€πŸ«  Teaching

I've taught the following courses at UC Santa Cruz:

While teaching remotely in 2020 and 2021, I live-streamed my undergraduate distributed systems lectures on Twitch! All the lecture videos from the course (Spring 2020, Spring 2021) are available on YouTube, where they have been viewed a collective ~100,000 times as of 2023.

πŸ› οΈ  Service

I co-founded the !!Con and !!Con West conferences of ten-minute talks on the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing, and I was a founding member of the board of the Exclamation Foundation, the nonprofit entity behind !!Con and !!Con West.

I chaired or co-chaired PLMW @ ICFP 2021, PLMW @ ICFP 2020, DSLDI 2018, DSLDI 2017, OBT 2017, and OBT 2016. I served as Publicity Chair of the ICFP Steering Committee, 2015—18, and as a member of the PLMW Steering Committee, 2021—23.

I have served on the program committees (why review papers?) of PaPoC 2023, POPL 2023, PLDI 2021, ASPLOS 2021, PLOS 2019, PaPoC 2019, the SPLASH 2018 Doctoral Symposium, OOPSLA 2018, PaPoC 2018, ICFP 2017, DSLDI 2016, IFL 2015, Onward! Papers 2015, PaPoC 2015, OBT 2015, IFL 2014, and the Haskell Symposium 2014, and on the external review committees of OOPSLA 2021, PLDI 2020, PLDI 2019, PLDI 2018, ECOOP 2016, and POPL 2016.

🌱  Recent drafts

🏑  Publications

πŸ“•  Dissertation

🏚  Older drafts

These papers are not being actively worked on and may be in disrepair.

🎀  Talks

πŸ‘¨β€πŸ‘©β€πŸ‘§  β€Personal

My husband, Alex Rudnick, does computational linguistics! We like to run marathons together, and run after Sylvia.