picture of Jonathan Aldrich

Jonathan Aldrich

Professor
Software and Societal Systems Department and Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

Office: 422 TCS Hall

Contact Information

jonathan.aldrich@cs.cmu.edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/
+1-412-268-7278 (phone)
+1-412-268-2338 (fax)
personal contact info and cell phone (CMU only)



ORCID iD 0000-0003-0631-5591

Shipping Address

Jonathan Aldrich
CMU - ISR - TCS Hall 430
4665 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Executive Assistant

Linda Campbell
lv2c at cs dot cmu dot edu

Research

I work at the intersection of programming languages and software engineering. My research explores how the way we express software affects our ability to engineer software at scale. A particular theme of much of my work is improving software quality and programmer productivity through better ways to express structural and behavioral aspects of software design within source code.

I have contributed to object-oriented typestate verification, modular reasoning techniques for aspects and stateful programs, and new object-oriented language models. For my work specifying and verifying architecture, I received a 2006 NSF CAREER award and the 2007 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize (press release, article). Right now I'm excited to be working on the design of Wyvern, a new modularly extensible programming language.

News

During my Spring 2022 sabbatical, I co-founded Noteful, a company whose mission is teaching the world to read music. Look out for a beta version of the app coming out soon!

New Students Wanted!

For this summer, I am looking for undergraduate or master's students for research projects including the Obsidian blockchain programming language, the Penrose language for visualizing mathematics, the TickTalk IoT language, and secure programming language development in Wyvern. These are part of CMU's Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Software Engineering program.

Also see information for prospective Ph.D. students and advice for current students.

Projects

  • Wyvern - A general-purpose language focused on security, modularity, and language extensibility.
  • Penrose - A language for visualizing mathematical objects.
  • Obsidian - A domain-specific language for writing safer smart contracts on blockchain and other platforms.
  • Plaid - A typestate-oriented, gradually typed programming language
  • AEminium - A concurrent-by-default programming language, implemented as an extension to Plaid
  • Object-Oriented Foundations - New models for object-oriented languages
  • Typestate - Verifying component and library usage constraints (Plural tool)
  • Separation Logic - Modular verification of higher-order, typed programs
  • Ownership and Architecture - Capturing the high-level structure of object graphs
  • ArchJava (no longer active) - Enforcing run-time software architecture within object-oriented code
  • SASyLF - An educational proof assistant for language and logic metatheory
  • Crystal - A Eclipse-based framework for teaching dataflow analysis

Talks

Selected talks and tutorials

Publications

All papers

Curriculum Vitae (html, PDF)

Service

I'm a member of the ACM Publications Board and I've created an informal FAQ to help people deal with publications issues that may come up. Questions and feedback on how we can do a better job is welcome!

Personal

In August 2003, I started teaching at Carnegie Mellon University. Before that, I was a graduate student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, working with Craig Chambers and David Notkin.

My wife Becky Billock and I enjoy hiking, backpacking, and mountain climbing, and playing music together. We were married in 2000 and have two awesome kids, Seal and Evelyn.