Eric Atkinson

Education

Candidate for Doctor of Philosophy, Massachusetts Institue of Technology. 2018-present

Massachusetts Institue of Technology, Master of Science. 2018

University of California, Berkeley, Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, High Honors. 2015

Research Experience

Research Assistant (2015 - Present)

• Advisor: Michael Carbin
• Shuffle: Masters-thesis work on verified probabilistic inference
• Reactive Probabilistic Programming: Collaboration with IBM on PPL technologies for reactive (i.e. streaming) programs.
• Belief Programming: Expected dissertation work on programming abstractions for nondeterministic uncertainty.

Facebook Internship (Summer 2018)

• Project: Internal language tools for differentiable programming
• Implemented differentiable programming.
• Embedded a language in Scala.
• Preliminary work on a tensor type system.
• Developed an IntelliJ plugin.

Research Assistant (Summer 2014, Summer 2015)

• Advisor: Rastislav Bodik
• Developed parallel Servo backend for attribute grammar compiler
• Formalized incremental layout

Mozilla Research Internship (Summer 2013)

• Managers: Dave Herman and Jack Moffit
• Member of the 5­-person Servo team
• Implemented layout features: floats, CSS box model, text decorations, line­breaking rules
• Progress towards parallel layout

Research Assistant (Summer 2012)

• Advisors: Rastislav Bodik and Leo Meyerovich
• Worked on the Parallel Web Browser project
• Specified a large portion of CSS 2.1 using attribute grammars
• Compiled AGs to Javascript and C++ layout engines
• Worked around parallel hazards using sub­traversals

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant (Spring 2021)

• Assisted for 6.UAR: undergraduate research

Lab Assistant (Spring 2012)

• Assisted for C.S. 61A, The Structure and Interpretation of Comuter Programs

Publications & Presentations

• "Simplifying Multiple-Statement Reductions in the Polyhedral Model" Cambridge Yang, Eric Atkinson, and Michael Carbin. Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. 2020. (to appear).
• "Programming and Reasoning with Partial Observability" Eric Atkinson and Michael Carbin. Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications. 2020.
• "Reactive Probabilistic Programming" Guillaume Baudart, Louis Mandel, Eric Atkinson, Benjamin Sherman, Marc Pouzet, and Michael Carbin. Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. 2020.
• "BHive: A Benchmark Suite and Measurement Framework for Validating x86-64 Basic Block Performance Models" Yishen Chen, Ajay Brahmakshatriya, Charith Mendis, Alex Renda, Eric Atkinson, Ondrej Sykora, Saman Amarasinghe, Michael Carbin. Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC). 2019.
• "Typesafety for Explicitly-coded Probabilistic Inference Procedures" Eric Atkinson, Master's Thesis. 2018.
• "Towards Correct-by-Construction Probabilistic Inference". Eric Atkinson and Michael Carbin. NIPS Machine Learning Systems workshop. 2016.
• "What We've Learned About Incremental Layout". Eric Atkinson. Bay area Rust Meetup, 2014.
• "Layout in Servo: Parallel and Rustic Tree Traversals"­ Eric Atkinson. Mozilla Internship Presentations, Summer 2013.
• "Parallelizing Browser Layout"­ Eric Atkinson. 3rd place, Student Research Competition, 34 th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, 2013.
• "Parallel Schedule Synthesis for Attribute Grammars" Leo Meyerovich, Rastislav Bodik, Eric Atkinson, Matthew Torok. 18th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, 2013.
• "Superconductor: A Language for Big Interactive Visualizations"­ Leo Meyerovich, Matthew Torok, Eric Atkinson, Rastislav Bodik. Workshop on Leveraging Abstractions and Semantics for High­performance Computing @ PPoPP 2013.

Honors & Awards

• Jacobs Presidential Fellowship 2015-2016
• EECS Honors Degree Program, 2013 - 2015 (select students with GPA 3.7+, research interest)
• Alumni Association Leadership Award Scholarship, 2011, 2014
• Dean's Honors, Fall 2012­present (GPA in top 4%)
• Kraft Award to Freshman, 2011 (awarded to freshman with 4.0 GPA)

Other Interests

• Eta Kappa Nu, Mu Chapter (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Honor Society)
  • Member, Spring 2013-present
  • Officer, Spring 2014-present
• Berke1337 Collegiate Cyber Defense Team
  • Member, Fall 2013 - present
  • Winner, 2014 Western Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition
  • 5th place, 2014 National Collegiatte Cyber Defense Competition