20th SoCal PLS:
Programming Languages and Systems
The SoCal Programming Languages and Systems Workshop is an informal gathering of programming languages and systems researchers in Southern California.
This spring, we’ll meet at the University of Southern California in the auditorium of Ginsburg Hall on Friday, February 27th, 2026.
Submit abstracts here by Friday, January 30th, 2026.
Workshop in Winter 2026
The primary goals of this workshop include:
- Providing a friendly environment for students and other researchers to present their work.
- Strengthening ties between local institutions.
- Learning about cool things happenings in programming languages, systems, and related areas!
Submission Guidelines
Both original research and work that has been published in other venues is welcome!
Selected abstracts will be presented as a talk or a poster. The program committee will determine the length of the talks based on the number and content of the abstracts; and they’ll provide more information when they notify you of acceptance.
Important Dates
| Friday, January 30th | Abstract submission deadline (end of day) |
| Friday, February 6th | Notification of acceptance |
| Friday, February 20th | Registration deadline |
| Friday, February 27th | SoCal PLS Workshop |
Registration
Details and registration link to be announced.
Schedule
| 9:30 am–10:45 am |
|---|
| The Command Line GUIde: Graphical Interfaces from Man Pages via AI. Saketh Ram Kasibatla, Kiran Medleri Hiremath, Raven Rothkopf, Sorin Lerner, Haijun Xia, and Brian Hempel. |
| Using Large Language Models and Constraint Logic Programming for Interpretable Mental Health Diagnosis. Brian Hyeongseok Kim and Chao Wang. |
| Nice to Meet You: Synthesizing Practical MLIR Abstract Transformers. Xuanyu Peng. |
| Bandwidth–Timeout Analysis via Quantitative Effects. Loi Ngo Duc Nguyen and Manu Sridharan. |
| Synthesizing Complex Program Analyzers from Natural Language Questions. Amirmohammad Nazari, Sadra Sabouri, Wang Bill Zhu, Robin Jia, Souti Chattopadhyay, and Mukund Raghothaman. |
| 11:15 am–12:30 pm |
|---|
| Wick: Fixing a hole in refinement type inference. Cole Kurashige, Nico Lehmann, and Ranjit Jhala. |
| Membership Testing for Semantic Regular Expressions. Yifei Huang, Matin Amini, Alexis Le Glaunec, Konstantinos Mamouras, and Mukund Raghothaman. |
| Pync: Function Level Incremental Execution for Python Scripts. Bolun Thompson, Kalon Kelley, Christian Gram Kalhauge, and Konstantinos Kallas. |
| Formalizing Grounded Arithmetic. Elliot Bobrow, Bryan Ford, and Stefan Milenkovic. |
| In Search of Failed Search: Unrealizability for Program Synthesis. Shaan Nagy. |
| 12:30 pm–2 pm |
|---|
| Lunch and posters. |
| 2 pm–3 pm |
|---|
| Testing Deep Learning Compilers with Cross-Layer Constraints. Yuxin Qiu, Jiyuan Wang, Ronak Badhe, Ben Limpanukorn, Miryung Kim, and Qian Zhang. |
| From Syntactic to Semantic Spectra for Fault Localization. Zhaorui Yang, Qian Zhang, Rajiv Gupta, and Ashish Kundu. |
| Rule-based Repair for Bespoke Fuzzing with LLMs. Ben Limpanukorn, Jiyuan Wang, Seongmin Lee, Ronak Badhe, Yuxin Qiu, Qian Zhang, and Miryung Kim. |
| On the Limits of Proof Sharing for Neural Networks. Kanak Das, Shubham Ugare, Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, Sasa Misailovic, Gagandeep Singh, and Manu Sridharan. |
| 3:30 pm–4:45 pm |
|---|
| Dependency-aware Residual Risk Analysis. Seongmin Lee and Marcel Böhme. |
| WhyFlow: Interrogative Debugger for Sensemaking Taint Analysis. Burak Yetiştiren, Hong Jin Kang, and Miryung Kim. |
| CXip List: A CXL-Aware Skip List. Steven Kim and Samuel Thomas. |
| Tabby: A Synthesis-Aided Compiler for High-Performance Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits. Junrui Liu, Jiaxin Song, Yannning Chen, Hanzhi Liu, Hongbo Wen, Luke Pearson, Yanju Chen, and Yu Feng. |
| Adaptive Counter-Attack Synthesis for Mitigation of Onchain Exploits. Hanzhi Liu, Yanju Chen, Jiaming Shan, Jiaxin Song, Chaofan Shou, Hongbo Wen, Yu Feng. |
Posters
- cuJSON: A Highly Parallel JSON Parser for GPUs. Ashkan Vedadi Gargary, Soroosh Safari Loaliyan, and Zhijia Zhao.
- Formalizing and Automating the Discovery of Weird States and Weird Machine Primitives Using Program Semantics. Ramesh Balaji, Matthew Revelle, and Meera Sridhar.
- SpecProto: A Parallelizing Compiler for Speculative Decoding of Large Protocol Buffers Data. Zhijie Wang.
- Mechanically Translating Iterative Dataflow Analysis to Algebraic Program Analysis. Chenyu Zhou, Jingbo Wang, and Chao Wang.
- ATLAS: A Ledger-Agnostic Observational Semantics for Mechanized Verification of Cross-Chain Protocols. Tooba Khan, Srivatsan Ravi, and Chao Wang.
- Bootstrapping Fuzzers for Compilers of Low-Resource Language Dialects Using Language Models. Sairam Vaidya, Marcel Böhme, Loris D’Antoni.
- The Microservice-ization of gem5. Connor Wang and Sam Thomas.
- Scr Mmy: A Co-Designed Secure and Compressed Memory. Henry Cannon and Sam Thomas.
- Heterogeneous Architectures for Machine Learning–Based Intrusion Detection in Autonomous Vehicles. Henrique C. Freitas, Marcos Amaris, and Jean-Luc Gaudiot.
- Scheduling Techniques with MORL to Reduce Carbon Emissions on HPC and Cloud Platforms. Marcos Amaris, Henrique C. Freitas, and Jean-Luc Gaudiot.
- Breaking Blockchain Consensus via Boundary-Seeking Fuzzing of Inter-Client State Serialization. Hanzhi Liu, Yanju Chen, Hongbo Wen, and Yu Feng.
Commuting and Parking
If you are traveling to Los Angeles by train, the easiest way to get from Union Station to USC is to take the southbound A-line (blue) train to the 7th Street Metro Center, and then switch to the westbound E-line (yellow) train to Expo Park / USC station. From there, Ginsburg Hall is a short 10-minute walk across campus. Google predicts the entire commute to take about 40 minutes from Union Station to Ginsburg Hall.
If you are driving to campus, you can park at the Downey Way Parking Structure, right across the street from Ginsburg Hall. Daily parking costs $20.50, and you can pay by phone.
Program Committee
| Mukund Raghothaman | USC |
| Chao Wang | USC |
| Loris D’Antoni | UCSD |
| Brian Demsky | UCI |
| Konstantinos Kallas | UCLA |
| Todd Millstein | UCLA |
Organization
- Local Organizers: Mukund Raghothaman Chao Wang