Cyrus Omar designs next-generation user interfaces for programming languages.

Education

Carnegie Mellon University
PhD, Computer Science
UIUC
BS, Computer Science
BS, Molecular & Cellular Biology

Teaching

Programming Languages
EECS 490 · W20, F20, W21, F21

Advising

PhD Students

MS Students

  • Priya Thanneermalai
  • Hannah Potter
  • Erin Deutschman

Undergraduates

There are 20+ undergraduate reseachers in FP Lab — see the FP Lab webpage!

Former Advisees

FP Lab alum include 1 Assistant Professor, 5 PhD students, and 43 students who went on to MS programs or industry!

Service

2021
ICFP PC · UIST External Reviewer · HATRA PC · CSE DEI Committee · CSE Hosting Committee
2020
TyDe Co-Chair · MWPLS Co-Chair · ICFP ERC · ICFP SRC · HATRA PC · LIVE PC · CSE DEI Committee
2019
Onward! PC · ML Workshop PC · META PC · LIVE PC · ICFP AEC
2017
GPCE Publicity Chair · GPCE PC · META PC
I lead the Future of Programming Lab (FP Lab), part of the vibrant MPLSE research community.
Recent Publications & Projects

Hazel: Live Functional Programming with Typed Holes

FP Lab is the academic home of Hazel, a new kind of live programming environment that can understand, manipulate, and run incomplete programs, i.e. programs with holes. The following publications develop the semantic foundations for Hazel.

POPL 2017
Cyrus Omar, Ian Voysey, Michael Hilton, Jonathan Aldrich and Matthew A. Hammer
POPL 2019
Cyrus Omar, Ian Voysey, Ravi Chugh and Matthew A. Hammer

These papers serve as the foundation for our ongoing research into the future of programming environments.

The National Science Foundation recently selected our research proposal for three years of funding.
There has been a great deal of excitement around Hazel, e.g. at Strange Loop and on Twitter [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]!

Livelits: Filling Typed Holes with Live GUIs

We are working on integrating graphical and programmatic modes of interaction by developing language mechanisms that allow you to define type-specific user interfaces that generate code underneath, i.e. they serve as interactive graphical literal notation.

We have (1) implemented this mechanism for Java as an Eclipse extension called Graphite, (2) surveyed nearly 500 developers to empirically validate the mechanism and to gather a wide variety of use cases, (3) performed a small pilot study, (4) added support for spliced expressions, (5) added support for live programming, (6) mechanically formalized these features, and (7) implemented this live literal mechanism into Hazel.

PLDI 2021
Cyrus Omar, David Moon, Andrew Blinn, Ian Voysey, Nicholas Collins, and Ravi Chugh
ICSE 2012
Cyrus Omar, YoungSeok Yoon, Thomas D. LaToza and Brad A. Myers

There has been a great deal of excitement around livelits, e.g. on Twitter [1, 2]!

Hazel Assistant: Integrative Foundations for Intelligent Programming Assistants

We are developing an intelligent programming assistant that synthesizes code satisfying specifications provided by human programmers in the form of types, tests, properties, and sketches, and guided by a learned understanding of idiomatic code.

To start with, we have developed the Smyth synthesizer, which adds support for sketching to Myth, a type-and-example directed synthesizer, by combining the live programming mechanisms from Hazel with a novel form of unevaluation, which propagates constraints to where they are relevant. This solves a long-standing problem: we no longer need trace-complete examples.

ICFP 2020
Justin Lubin, Nicholas Collins, Cyrus Omar, and Ravi Chugh

We are now working to scale up and integrate Smyth into the Hazel user interface, which requires considering the problems of interactivity, incrementality, and readability. Check out our first demo!

Relit: Reasonably Programmable Literal Notation

My thesis research developed mechanisms that allow library providers to express new type-specific literal notation (e.g. SQL literals) while ensuring that client programmers can still reason abstractly and compositionally about types and binding.

ICFP 2018
Cyrus Omar and Jonathan Aldrich
ECOOP 2014
Cyrus Omar, Darya Kurilova, Ligia Nistor, Benjamin Chung, Alex Potanin and Jonathan Aldrich
Distinguished Paper Award

Relit implements the mechanism from the ICFP 2018 paper into Reason, which is Facebook's new front-end for OCaml. The Wyvern programming language implements the mechanism from the ECOOP 2014 paper.

There has been a great deal of excitement around both Relit [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and Wyvern [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]!
Previous Publications & Projects

typy: Programmable Semantic Fragments

typy allows library providers to install new statically typed semantic fragments into Python, while leaving its syntax alone (which cleverly sidesteps the "expression problem"). We have applied typy to problems in web security and data science.

PSP 2014
Nathan Fulton, Cyrus Omar and Jonathan Aldrich
Best Paper Award

The typy implementation is quiet as I focus on my other projects, but if you want to take the lead, contact me!

SciUnit: Collaborative Infrastructure for Test-Driven Scientific Model Validation

One of the pillars of the scientific method is model validation: comparing a scientific model’s predictions against empirical data. The SciUnit project casts this as a form of collaborative software testing and develops useful infrastructure.

ICSE 2014
NIER Track
Cyrus Omar, Richard C. Gerkin and Jonathan Aldrich

My collaborators Rick Gerkin and Sharon Crook continue to develop and apply SciUnit as part of the SciDash project.

Neurobiological Circuit Dynamics

I entered grad school as a computational neurobiologist. I was interested in how biological circuits process information, so I developed a model of how the excitatory-inhibitory circuitry in the rodent whisker barrel cortex responds to stimulation.

J. Neurosci.
2012
Jason W. Middleton, Cyrus Omar, Brent Doiron and Daniel J. Simons

I still find brains fascinating, but I think we will need more powerful computational tools to make the next leap in understanding, so now I study programming languages and programming environments!

Information Theoretic Foundations for Brain-Computer Interfaces

We built a provably optimal EEG-based brain-computer interface by studying the information theoretic properties of noisy asymmetric channels and developing statistical models of user intent for various types of communication/control tasks.

IJHCI 2011
BCI Issue
Cyrus Omar, Abdullah Akce, Miles Johnson, Timothy Bretl, Rui Ma, Edward Maclin, Michael McCormick and Todd Coleman

I remain very interested in building tools that help people with limited mobility and other disabilities express their intent. I also remain very interested in tastefully incorporating statistical models of user intent into programming environments.