Hi! I’m Ellen Arteca, and I’m currently finishing up my Masters at the University of Waterloo, in Canada. In the fall, I’ll be starting my PhD at Northeastern University, in the USA.

During my Masters, I’ve been mainly working on the more theoretical side of PL; I’ve been formalizing semantics for a contract-based type system for sound gradually typed TypeScript, and proving soundness of this system in Coq. I’ve also worked on a few side projects (with my supervisor and with Alexi Turcotte), mainly in gradual typing theory but also with some C FFI formalization. Before starting my Masters, my main introduction to PL (and what sparked my interest in the field) was working on an open source UML-to-code compiler called Umple.

I did my undergrad at a small university in a small town in northern Ontario, so the vast majority of my exposure to the PL community has been during Masters. I attended OOPSLA this past fall as a student volunteer, and that conference was a great experience. It was really fun meeting all the other grad students, and I learned a lot attending the talks. I’m hoping ECOOP will be a similar experience, with a mix of more social fun and learning. In particular, there are some talks about gradual typing that I’m excited for, but I’m sure all the talks will be interesting!

I’m also going to be attending the summer school. From this, I’m mainly hoping to learn more about program analysis, as I’m very interested in this field but as of yet haven’t had much exposure to it!

And of course, I’m excited to visit Amsterdam, which I’ve never been to before. See y’all soon!