Colin McDonald

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

My broad research interests include programming languages, parallelism, type theory, NLP, and formal logic. I'm currently working on compiling efficient parallel functional programs, and using syntax and type constraints to improve language model-generated code!

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

Publications

Spork: Automatic Parallelism Management for Loops. pdf
McDonald, Westrick, Fluet, Acar. In submission (POPL 2026).

GraFeyn: Efficient Parallel Sparse Simulation of Quantum Circuits. pdf cite
Westrick, Liu, Kang, McDonald, Rainey, Xu, Arora, Ding, Acar. In Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering. 2024.
Best Paper Award, Quantum Systems Software (2nd Place).

@inproceedings{grafeyn-2024,
  author={Westrick, Sam and Liu, Pengyu and Kang, Byeongjee and McDonald, Colin and Rainey, Mike and Xu, Mingkuan and Arora, Jatin and Ding, Yongshan and Acar, Umut A.},
  booktitle={2024 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)}, 
  title={GraFeyn: Efficient Parallel Sparse Simulation of Quantum Circuits}, 
  year={2024},
  volume={01},
  number={},
  pages={1132-1142},
  doi={10.1109/QCE60285.2024.00132}
}

Exact Recursive Probabilistic Computing. pdf cite
Chiang, McDonald, Shan. In Proc. of the ACM on Programming Languages. 2023.

@article{perpl-2023,
  author = {Chiang, David and McDonald, Colin and Shan, Chung-chieh},
  title = {Exact Recursive Probabilistic Programming},
  year = {2023},
  issue_date = {April 2023},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  volume = {7},
  number = {OOPSLA1},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3586050},
  doi = {10.1145/3586050},
  journal = {Proc. ACM Program. Lang.},
  month = apr,
  articleno = {98},
  numpages = {31}
}

Syntax-Based Attention Masking for Neural Machine Translation. pdf cite
McDonald, Chiang. In Proc. NAACL Student Research Workshop. 2021.

@inproceedings{syntax-attn-mask-nmt-2021,
  title = "Syntax-Based Attention Masking for Neural Machine Translation",
  author = "McDonald, Colin and Chiang, David",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop",
  month = jun,
  year = "2021",
  address = "Online",
  publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
  url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-srw.7/",
  doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-srw.7",
  pages = "47--52"
}

Strong Functional Pearl: Harper's Regular-Expression Matcher in Cedille. pdf cite
Stump, Jenkins, Spahn, McDonald. In Proc. of the ACM on Programming Languages. 2020.

@article{cedille-regex-2020,
  author = {Stump, Aaron and Jenkins, Christopher and Spahn, Stephan and McDonald, Colin},
  title = {Strong functional pearl: Harper’s regular-expression matcher in Cedille},
  year = {2020},
  issue_date = {August 2020},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  volume = {4},
  number = {ICFP},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3409004},
  doi = {10.1145/3409004},
  journal = {Proc. ACM Program. Lang.},
  month = aug,
  articleno = {122},
  numpages = {25}
}

Awards

NDSEG Fellow (2023)
NSF GRFP Awardee (2023)
Gilman Scholarship Awardee (2020)
U.S. Presidential Scholar (2019)

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