Colin McDonald

Second-year PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Umut Acar

My broad research interests include programming languages, parallelism, type theory, quantum computing, NLP, and formal logic. I'm currently working on compiling efficient parallel functional programs!

You can check out what I've been up to recently on my GitHub page.

Publications

GraFeyn: Efficient Parallel Sparse Simulation of Quantum Circuits
Westrick, Liu, Kang, McDonald, Rainey, Xu, Arora, Ding, Acar. In Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering. 2024.
Exact Recursive Probabilistic Computing. pdf
Chiang, McDonald, Shan. In Proc. of the ACM on Programming Languages. 2023.
Syntax-Based Attention Masking for Neural Machine Translation. pdf
McDonald and Chiang. In Proc. NAACL Student Research Workshop. 2021.
Strong Functional Pearl: Harper's Regular-Expression Matcher in Cedille. pdf
Stump, Jenkins, Spahn, McDonald. In Proc. of the ACM on Programming Languages. 2020.
Elaborating Inductive Definitions and Course-of-Values Induction in Cedille. pdf
Jenkins, McDonald, Stump. Preprint. 2019.

Awards

2023 NDSEG Fellow
2023 NSF GRFP Awardee
* Declined — chose NDSEG

2020 Gilman Scholarship Awardee
* Declined due to COVID-19

2019 U.S. Presidential Scholar

Education

Carnegie Mellon University, August 2023 - Current
Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science

University of Notre Dame, Class of 2023
Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, Computer Science and Philosophy
Natural Language Processing Group

TA Experience

Fall 2022: CSE 40431 - Programming Languages
Spring 2022: CSE 30151 - Theory of Computing