The PLASMA Lab (Programming Languages and Systems at MAssachusetts), co-led by Professors Emery Berger, Yuriy Brun, and Arjun Guha, is a research group in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

PLASMA currently includes 9 PhD students and has an established history of incorporating undergraduate students in research projects, and an excellent track record in delivering widely-used and high impact open source software.

PLASMA explores ways to make programming languages faster, safer, and easier to use. All of our projects aim to positively impact people outside of the programming languages community, often with a distinct aim for social good.

Our work appears in top CS publications such as PLDI, OOPSLA, SOSP, ASPLOS, and ICSE and has won numerous awards, including Best Paper at SOSP 2015 for our Coz project, Best Paper at OOPSLA 2014 for our SurveyMan project and Distinguished Artifact Awards at PLDI 2014 and PLDI 2015 (for Doppio and FlashRelate). Our paper on the AutoMan project has been selected to appear in the Research Highlights section of Communications of the ACM.

We are looking to recruit talented GSoC students to help us push the state-of-the-art in programming language design and implementation. We plan to merge all code contributed by GSoC students into our open source projects for dissemination to the general public. Whenever relevant, we gratefully acknowledge the work of our GSoC students in peer-reviewed scientific articles.