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

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"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 elegant, correct, and efficient. Some of my group's recent projects include library-level choreographic programming in Haskell and in Rust, dependently-typed diagrams for inductive reasoning about concurrent executions, and expressing and verifying causal message delivery with refinement types.

My research group, the CASL group, is part of the larger Languages, Systems, and Data (LSD) Lab. CASL stands for whatever we want it to (Concurrency and Safety Lab; Creative, Ambitious Systems and Languages; Curses! Another Separation Logic!; Can't Allocate, Stack Limit; ...) and is pronounced like "castle". Castles symbolize strength, safety, longevity, and a bit of magic and whimsy -- all qualities I aim for in my work. The current members of the CASL group are Jonathan Castello (PhD), Tim Goodwin (PhD, co-advised with Andrew Quinn), Nathan Liittschwager (PhD), Patrick Redmond (PhD), Gan Shen (PhD), and Yan Tong (PhD). 🎓 Shun Kashiwa completed his MS thesis on ChoRus with me in 2024 and is now a PhD student at UC San Diego. 🎓 Ali Ali created "Communicating Chorrectly with a Choreography" with me and graduated with his BS in 2024.

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

👩🏻‍🏫  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 collectively been viewed over 200,000 times according to YouTube analytics as of 2024.

🛠️  Service

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

I chaired or co-chaired Choreographic Programming 2024, 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 ICFP 2024, HATRA 2023, FHPNC 2023, 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

📕  Dissertation

🏚  Older drafts

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

🎤  Talks

👨‍👩‍👧  ‍Personal

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