Luis Hernández Rocha

[Zite0]

Personal Details

Name: Luis Hernández Rocha

Undergrad or MEng? Undergrad

**Year in Cornel: ** Junior

Relevant Classes: CS3110, CS4110, CS3410 (Currently), CS4820 (Currently)

Expertise (languages/frameworks/etc.): OCaml, C, Java, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript

Research

When do you want to do research?

I want to do research next semester (Spring 2025).

What is exciting to you about research?
I am interested in the intersection of programming languages and computer architecture, so I am really excited about language implementation and compilers. I find the latter riveting because I think it captures the intersection of hardware and programming languages. I also find the use of formal methods in the implementation of these tools especially appealing because it draws from formal mathematics to provide strong guarantees of correctness. I find projects that combine formal methods and compilers, such as CompCert, fascinating.

What kind of research do you want to do?
I would like to do research in programming languages and compiler construction, but I am open to explore other areas.

Background

Was there a paper that particularly excited you?
While studying NP-Completeness in my algorithms class, I learned that register allocation is an NP-Complete problem. In a conversation with Prof. Zach Tatlock, he shared his perspective that PL will increasingly intersect with machine learning and other AI subfields. This context makes the paper "RL4ReAl: Reinforcement Learning for Register Allocation" particularly exciting to me. It demonstrates a novel pproach to tackling intractable problems in compiler construction by leveraging reinforcement learning instead of employing more 'traditional' heuristic methods.

Which of the current research projects would you be interested in working on and why?
I would be interested in working on Filament. At a first glance, I find the language's use of types to reason about programs very exciting, as it combines programming language theory with hardware design. I would also like to work on Calyx because I would like to explore how hardware acceleration intersects with programming languages and compiler design.

Attach a CV/Resumé:
Luis-Hernandez-Resume.pdf