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emeryberger

HN member
Joined
Mon, Nov 17, 2014, 2:34 AM UTC
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276
Public activity
101 items

About emeryberger

Emery Berger is a Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus of the UMass system. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. He is also an Amazon Scholar at Amazon Web Services.

Professor Berger has been a Visiting Scientist at Microsoft Research and at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) / Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Professor Berger’s research spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance.

He and his group are the creators of a number of influential software systems including Hoard (http://www.hoard.org), a fast and scalable memory manager that accelerates multithreaded applications (used by companies including British Telecom, Cisco, Crédit Suisse, Reuters, Royal Bank of Canada, SAP, and Tata, and on which the Mac OS X memory manager is based); DieHard, an error-avoiding memory manager that directly influenced the design of the Windows 7 Fault-Tolerant Heap; and DieHarder, a secure memory manager that was an inspiration for hardening changes made to the Windows 8 heap.

He served two terms on the SIGPLAN Executive Committee, a decade as an Associate Editor for TOPLAS, and was the program chair of PLDI 2016 and co-program chair for ASPLOS 2021. He received the SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award in 2024.

His honors include a Microsoft Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Lilly Teaching Fellowship, the Distinguished Artifact Award for PLDI 2014, the Most Influential Paper Award at OOPSLA 2012, PLDI 2016, and ASPLOS 2019; best paper awards at FAST, OOPSLA, SOSP, and OSDI; five papers selected as CACM Research Highlights, a Google Research Award, and a Microsoft SEIF Award; he was named an ACM Fellow in 2019.

Recent public activity

  1. comment
    Comment #48462473

    Since we are talking about Python type-checkers: we've built a (non-AI based) type assistant for Python called RightTyper ( https://github.com/RightTyper/RightTyper ). Below is a b…

  2. comment
    Comment #45410111

    RightTyper is much better in addition to running orders of magnitude faster. https://github.com/RightTyper/RightTyper (full disclosure, I am one of its authors).

  3. comment
    Comment #45365647

    You can adjust the code on the page easily (it’s open source javascript) to determine the question you are after, which is a valid one: if an adversary starts today and adds x node…

  4. comment
    Comment #45365002

    The Tor Project web site makes a bold claim to its users: "Tor Browser prevents someone watching your connection from knowing what websites you visit. All anyone monitoring your br…

  5. story
  6. comment
    Comment #43896652

    Yes. It lets the LLM immediately obtain precise information rather than having to reason across the entire source code of the code base (which ChatDBG also enables). For example (f…

  7. comment
    Comment #43895596

    You should check out ChatDBG project - which AFAICT goes much further than this work, though in a different direction, and which, among other things, lets the LLM drive the debuggi…

  8. comment
    Comment #43065172

    Nice UI. We started on a project that does this about 2 years ago. ChatDBG ( https://github.com/plasma-umass/ChatDBG ), downloaded about 70K times to date. It integrates into debug…

  9. comment
    Comment #42623500

    Correction: it’s been a feature for at least two years. To our knowledge, Scalene was the first profiler to incorporate LLMs.

  10. comment
    Comment #42618457

    One major limitation the LLM has is that it can't run a profiler on the code, but we can. (This would be a fun thing to do in the future - feed the output of perf to the LLM and sa…

  11. comment
    Comment #42502500

    Debuggers are great, and even better with LLMs! https://github.com/plasma-umass/ChatDBG https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16354

  12. comment
    Comment #42261643

    However, the resulting type annotations should work for Python 3.9+.

  13. comment
    Comment #42261640

    It relies on some features introduced in Python 3.12, specifically the `sys.monitoring` API.

  14. comment
    Comment #42261397

    Can’t honestly remember the details! But it’s very much an AWS-owned org.

  15. comment
    Comment #42261339

    In addition to being a faculty member at UMass Amherst, I am an Amazon Scholar, working at Amazon Web Services, where this work was conducted.

  16. comment
    Comment #42261299

    I agree that writing type hints can be painful, especially if you are starting with a large code base that is mostly untyped. You might consider using RightTyper ( https://github.c…

  17. comment
    Comment #41945456

    Now posted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VF3pISRYRc&t=4862s

  18. comment
    Comment #41942560

    In his talk at REBASE, Fil said the overhead is now 1.5x to 5x, and he is just getting started optimizing.

  19. comment
    Comment #41936981

    From Fil Pizlo ( http://www.filpizlo.com/ ), major contributor to WebKit's JavaScript engine, among other things: > Fil-C is already powerful enough to run a memory-safe curl and a…

  20. story
  21. comment
    Comment #41914990

    Scalene author here - please file an issue!

  22. comment
    Comment #41911594

    (Scalene author here) Nope, but WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is, and Scalene works great with it.

  23. comment
    Comment #41850525

    Those papers say "language" over and over again, in the titles, in the body of the text. That work confounds languages and their implementations, and make it sound like there is a …

  24. comment
    Comment #41840332

    We only pin to one core for one experiment described in Section 4.3. All the remaining experiments are run with full access to all cores.

  25. comment
    Comment #41804907

    Hi, co-author here! We're happy to answer questions. See some discussion here: * Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@ltratt/113282264909342842 * Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/y12hdo…