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Pitch a Project

Last edited: August 8, 2025

User Story

Sejin is the executive administrative assistant at Nueva, working on scheduling Liza, Lee, Terry, and the other admins against the members of the wider community. Sejin spends most of her day scheduling people, of which, the largest time drawn is spent convincing people to move their schedules “in favor” of that of another person (i.e. manually). The reason why this is done is because her approach to scheduling is one-shot: emailing everybody for general availability, noting in her mind who the high-priority attendees are (say, Liza), and if no times match asking/convincing those in lower priority to move their schedules. Although she enjoys the process of putting events together, she is particularly frustrated that, due to the busy schedules and often back-and-forth emails needed to get and conform everyone’s schedule, response rates to complicated scheduling problems are low.

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Last edited: August 8, 2025

The PSC is a supercomputing center.

PKM

Last edited: August 8, 2025

A PKM is a tool (like this one!) to help manage your nodes and knowledge.

  • storing AND processing; just storing is just PIM not PKM
  • PKM = PIM (personal info management) + GTD + knowledge management
  • goal: narrowing “flood” and focus on useful areas
  • move from passive => active consumption
  • create, not just regurgitate

PKM and Context

  • store info based on context

Strategy

  • What are you trying to organize
  • what are the inputs?
    • email? lectures?:
      • “reference” type emails
      • lecture notes
      • tasks?
  • what are you trying to make?
    • test? essays?
      • a time blocking schedule
      • studying for tests (i.e. for linear, etc.)
  • what does your process look like?
    • mishmash of topic based notes and content based notes
  • what parts of it would you like to improve?
    • article capture workflow: how to process random readings topic wise?
    • knowledge capture: how to come across new content and capture them somewhere?
    • todo/notes integration: task management and note taking currently lives separately, how to unify them?

zettlekasten

PL Index

Last edited: August 8, 2025

Key ideas

  • appreciating PL as a techincal field
    • OS people cares only about dynamic system—build a good runtime/OS, etc.
    • PL people cares only about static system—build a compiler, etc.
  • think systematically about PL tools
  • what we can do, what we can’t do, what will be able to do
  • basics of active research in PL

equal in expressive power

  • SKI calculus
  • Lambda calculus
  • Turing machines

Lectures

Combinator Calculus

Lambda Calculus

Objects

Programming Abstractions and Logic Programming

Contravariance

planning

Last edited: August 8, 2025

A decision making method using search on a model of the problem to be able tom make decisions.

  1. create a (usually deterministic, but for CS238 we care only about non-deterministic cases) model of the problem or a good approximation thereof
  2. use the model to plan for possible next actions to yield for a good solution

contrast v. explicit programming

explicit programming requires you to plan for the action