Nick's talk info

lsd-ucsc · Sep 27, 2023 · e019f87 · e019f87
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diff --git a/content/lsd-seminar/2023fa.md b/content/lsd-seminar/2023fa.md
@@ -19,8 +19,8 @@ Talks will be advertised on the [ucsc-lsd-seminar-announce](https://groups.googl
 
 | Date                | Speaker                                                               | Title                                                             |
 |-------              |---------                                                              |---------                                                          |
-| [Sept. 29](#sept-29)| Vikram Narayanan                                                      | Towards fine-grained compartmentalization of operating system kernels|
-| [Oct. 6](#oct-6)    | Nick Rioux                                                            | TBD                                                               |
+| [Sept. 29](#sept-29)| Vikram Narayanan                                                      | Towards fine-grained compartmentalization of operating system kernels |
+| [Oct. 6](#oct-6)    | Nick Rioux                                                            | Compositional & Scalable Programming in Granite                   |
 | [Oct. 13](#oct-13)  | Harrison Goldstein                                                    | TBD                                                               |
 | [Oct. 20](#oct-20)  | TBD                                                                   | TBD                                                               |
 | [Oct. 27](#oct-27)  | TBD                                                                   | TBD                                                               |
@@ -64,11 +64,30 @@ kernels, and heterogeneous systems.
 
 **Speaker:** Nick Rioux
 
-**Title:** TBD
-
-**Abstract:** TBD
-
-**Bio:** TBD
+**Title:** Compositional & Scalable Programming in Granite
+
+**Abstract:** Granite is a strict and untyped programming language under development with the
+goal of enhancing functional programming along a number of axes.
+It aims to provide a basis for general-purpose programming that is:
+
+1. Compositional: It is easy to extend (mutually) recursive functions to
+    support new cases.
+2. Expressive: Programmers can work with both the rich data structures common
+    in functional programming as well as cyclic data more naturally supported by
+    Datalog.
+3. Scalable: Programs naturally incorporate parallelism in a manner reminiscent
+    of LVars. This should also extend to eventually consistent-by-design distributed
+    computation a la CRDTs.
+
+Perhaps surprisingly, these three aspects of language design are related:
+Granite's design is emerging from the observation that the key to achieving each
+of the above-mentioned goals is a join-semilattice. Granite makes semilattice
+structure a first-class language feature; we'll see what this means by example.
+
+**Bio:** Nick is a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. He applies mathematical
+concepts from abstract algebra to make it more practical for programmers to
+break their code into smaller reusable components while also scaling their
+programs across a distributed system.
 
 # Oct. 13