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PL Perspectives

Perspectives on computing and technology from and for those with an interest in programming languages.

The Missing Mentoring Pillar

by Rachit Nigam and Alexa VanHattum on Jan 13, 2025 | The Missing Mentoring Pillar

The Missing Mentoring Pillar

The programming languages (PL) community has developed a whole host of mentoring pillars to help new research become a part of our community

  • The Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW), our 1-2 day workshop before each of our four flagship conferences, answers: How do I make the most of a conference? How do I start as a programming languages researcher?
  • SIGPLAN-M, our international, long-term mentor-matching program, addresses: How do I grow as a researcher within the community? How do I navigate critical transitions like applying to graduate school, deciding a thesis topic, or managing a conflict with an advisor?
  • PLTea, one of our social planning organizations: How do I form my network of researchers?

But one key piece is missing here: how do I present my specific research? Presenting research—writing a paper, iterating on feedback, building a slide deck, and quickly pitching your project—are almost required skills to make your research visible. However, by default, opportunities to present research come near the conclusion of a project which might take anywhere from a couple of months to more than a year and without practice, it is hard to hone these skills.

So, how can we design a mentoring pillar for the PL community that provides junior researchers access to high-quality expert feedback and an opportunity to practice their presentation skills without needing to conclude multi-year projects?

Student Research Competition

The stated goal of an ACM SRC is to be a “unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research before a panel of judges and attendees at well-known ACM-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences.” ACM SRCs are separated by undergraduate and graduate students and have three components:

  • A short abstract submission
  • Poster presentation at the conference for the selected abstracts
  • Short conference-style presentation for semifinalists

Per ACM rules, each of the latter two steps must be judged (and given feedback from) at least 3 Computer Science professionals (with PhDs) unaffiliated with the contestant. For PL conferences, the abstracts are reviewed by a Program Committee (PC) of PhDs, the same as any of our conferences. The student winners in both the undergraduate and graduate categories go on to compete in the ACM Grand Finals, where students submit five-page papers.

Ostensibly, the SRC covers every part of presenting research: students need to write papers on their individual contributions, design posters to pitch their work to area experts, and give high-quality talks. Unfortunately, SRCs generally suffer from several challenges that make it hard for them to provide the kind of feedback students would need to improve their presentation skills.

A Difficult Balancing Act

SRCs are pitched as a research competition, indicating externally that the program committee cares only for the highest-quality, polished research. For people within the community, SRC is often viewed as a low visibility forum, which means mentors rarely encourage their mentees to submit to it. We view this dichotomy as the core issue with the SRC: the “competition” portion of the forum is not visible enough to warrant the best submissions and the feedback mechanisms are not always robust enough to be useful in the research process for junior students.

Our proposal to revamp the SRC more broadly is focused on two goals:

  1. Refocus the SRC to be a feedback-oriented forum by providing high-quality feedback from experts in the community.
  2. Make the SRC research more visible in the community.

Some overlapping communities are already closer to these ideals—for example, the SPLASH 2024 SRC had archival proceedings encouraging authors to write high-quality submissions. In our friendly neighboring community of SIGARCH, several major architecture conferences have a YArch (“Young Architect”) workshop. YArch sits at an interesting sweet spot between PLMW and our current SRC: junior graduate and research-active undergraduate students must submit papers to be accepted, and each submission receives detailed feedback from experts with PhDs both before the workshop and in person during it. 

Concrete Changes for PLDI SRC 2025

As co-chairs of this year’s SRC at PLDI 2025, we plan to make the following changes:

  1. Program committee size: We will recruit more experts with PhDs to join the SRC Program Committee. If you have (or will have by June) a PhD and you consider yourself part of the PLDI community, please consider filling out our nomination form! You can also nominate your collaborators and friends.
  2. Archival extended abstracts and shepherding: Accepted abstract submissions (3 pages, double column) to the SRC will be included in the PLDI 2025 proceedings. Each accepted submission will be assigned a shepherd from the program committee, who will help summarize the committee’s suggested changes and provide additional writing feedback to the student prior to the camera ready.
  3. Pre-submission guidance. Previous SRC chairs have noted that students are sometimes unsure if their work even qualifies for submission to the SRC. We have a simple Google form that students can fill out to get in touch with the SRC chairs and have these questions answered. If you are a student uncertain about your work, please reach out to us!
  4. Highlight the SRC winners. In the most recent PLDI, SRC winners were presented at the banquet rather than the business meeting, which we think was a positive change. We plan to further increase SRC visibility by saying a few sentences about why the judges selected each winning project. We will also note if any undergraduate or masters student winners are planning to apply to PhD programs in the near future. 
  5. Continue to push for travel/registration funding via SIGPLAN PAC. We would like to move to a model where the SIGPLAN PAC secures funding for the SRC for students who otherwise could not attend, rather than this falling to individual conference organizers. 

We intend these changes to be preliminary and we have an explicit goal to not increase the amount of work per SRC committee member. We will report on our experience of running the PLDI 2025 SRC with these changes to inform the community on how to best utilize the SRC in the future. Our goal is to maximize the effectiveness of the SRC in building up the communication skills of the next generation of programming language researchers. While we have already initiated conversations with previous SRC chairs across the programming languages community, if you have thoughts about the limitations or challenges for the SRC, please reach out to us!

We thank Chandrakana Nandi, Jubi Taneja, and Adrian Sampson for feedback on early drafts of this post as well as the organizers of SRCs at various programming languages conferences.

Rachit Nigam is an assistant professor at MIT where he directs the Foundations of Languages and Machines (FLAME) lab. He likes talking to people, boba tea, and building compilers.

Alexa VanHattum is an assistant professor at Wellesley College, where she leads the Programming Systems Lab. She likes telling people about the primarily-undergraduate college career path, lightweight formal methods, and verifying compilers.

Disclaimer: These posts are written by individual contributors to share their thoughts on the SIGPLAN blog for the benefit of the community. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal, belong solely to the blog author and do not represent those of ACM SIGPLAN or its parent organization, ACM.