Carnegie Mellon University
November 16, 2018

REUSE Students Sweep Undergrad Research Competition

By Josh Quicksall

Research Experience for Undergraduates in Software Engineering (REUSE) program students Justin Lubin, Paulette Koronkevich, and Serena Chen swept the competition to win top undergraduate honors this November at the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH).

Lubin, a sophomore at The University of Chicago, took home first prize for his work, “Approximating Polymorphic Effects with Capabilities”.  Koronkevich, an Indiana University senior, claimed second placer for her paper, “Obsidian in the Rough: A Case Study Evaluation of a New Blockchain Programming Language”. And Chen, a senior at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, was awarded third place for her paper, “Finding Higher Order Mutants Using Variational Execution”.

With support from the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates’ program, the REUSE program is geared towards providing undergraduate students from institutions with limited software engineering research opportunities the chance to work on challenging, innovative research projects. Students spend the summer on Carnegie Mellon’s main campus working closely with the Institute for Software Research’s renowned faculty to explore topics ranging from information visualization to self-adaptive system architecture. Capitalizing on the ISR’s tradition in collaborative and cross-disciplinary research, students in the REUSE program have the chance to work with researchers across the School of Computer Science, including Societal Computing, Human Computer Interaction, Robotics, and more.

The ACM SIGPLAN SPLASH conference brings together leading researchers concerned with all aspects of software construction and delivery. It is widely regarded as the premier conference at the intersection of programming languages and software engineering.