I am Rohan Achar, a first year PhD student in Software Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. I work with Prof. Crista Lopes at the Mondego lab in UCI. My area of interest is programming language design. I am currently working on a concept we call Predicate Collection Classes, which is a method of retyping collections of objects based on a declarative predicate. The work requires a good bit of language design (the implementation of which requires a lot of behind-the-scenes hacking which is absolutely fun to do). There is a lot of active work in the field of programming language design, and ECOOP is one of the best places for such publications.

I find myself getting very exciting for three things. First, I am looking forward to presenting my group’s latest work at a workshop at ECOOP. I am anticipating a terrific discussion that will give me amazing ideas and directions to work towards in the future. Second, the topics discussed at the summer school program offered by ECOOP are perfect for the work I am doing. As a student just starting out in research, understanding the field I am in is very important, and I think this summer school is an excellent opportunity to this end. Lastly, I also hope to see researchers in my field present their latest amazing works, and I hope to learn a lot from their work. I expect to make connections for possible future friendships and collaborations. This is extremely exciting and I cannot wait to be there and take in everything that I can.