Katherine Ye

I'm a fifth-year PhD student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

My work is supported by the NSF, a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, and an ARCS Foundation Fellowship.

Office: Smith (EDSH) 232

Penrose-related queries: team@penrose.ink

Other queries: kqy@cs.cmu.edu

NOTE: I'm on leave for the 2021-2022 school year and am not accepting new professional commitments. For talks and other invitations, please consider contacting members of the Penrose team, who are doing amazing work!

I'm co-advised by Keenan Crane and Jonathan Aldrich, in collaboration with Josh Sunshine. We're building Penrose, a platform that enables people to create beautiful diagrams just by typing mathematical notation in plain text. Check out the Penrose site for more information.

Interested in collaborating, contributing, or using Penrose? Get in touch!

News

April 2021
New work accepted to DIS '21: Search Atlas: Visualizing Divergent Search Results Across Geopolitical Borders. Press: Wired, Vice (this is not an endorsement of the press!)

Feb. 2021
Joined as a SIGGRAPH '21 external reviewer.

Sept. 2020
Gave talks at UMBC, MIT VIS, Tableau Research, ISR REUSE, Deep Learning (Classics & Trends), and UC Santa Cruz. Thank you to those who invited me!

Aug. 2020
Glad to join the program committee of HATRA '20.

April 2020
Paper accepted to SIGGRAPH '20 on "Penrose: From Mathematical Notation to Beautiful Diagrams"! Check out our paper page. Press: Nature, Popular Mechanics

Jan. 2020
Paper accepted to CHI '20 on "How domain experts create conceptual diagrams and implications for tool design"! It received a Best Paper Honorable Mention.

May 2019
The Penrose team is now supported by the NSF! See our grant abstract here.

Feb. 2019
Honored to be recognized with a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship.



Conference papers

Search Atlas: Visualizing Divergent Search Results Across Geopolitical Borders
Rodrigo Ochigame* and Katherine Ye* (*equal contribution)
In DIS '21 (pictorials).

Penrose: From Mathematical Notation to Beautiful Diagrams
Katherine Ye, Nimo Ni, Max Krieger, Dor Ma'ayan, Jenna Wise, Jonathan Aldrich, Joshua Sunshine, Keenan Crane
In SIGGRAPH '20.

How domain experts create conceptual diagrams and implications for tool design (Best Paper Honorable Mention)
Dor Ma'ayan*, Nimo Ni*, Katherine Ye, Chinmay Kulkarni, Joshua Sunshine (*equal contribution)
In CHI '20.

Verified correctness and security of mbedTLS HMAC-DRBG | slides
Katherine Ye, Matthew Green, Naphat Sanguansin, Lennart Beringer, Adam Petcher, and Andrew W. Appel.
In ACM CCS '17.

The end of history? Using a proof assistant to replace language design with library design
Adam Chlipala, Benjamin Delaware, Samuel Duchovni, Jason Gross, Clément Pit-Claudel, Sorawit Suriyakarn, Peng Wang and Katherine Ye (alphabetical).
In SNAPL (Summit for Advances in Programming Languages) '17.

Verified correctness and security of OpenSSL HMAC
Lennart Beringer, Adam Petcher, Katherine Ye, and Andrew Appel.
In USENIX Security ’15.

Journal papers

The building blocks of interpretability | NYTimes article
Chris Olah, Arvind Satyanarayan, Ian Johnson, Shan Carter, Ludwig Schubert, Katherine Ye, and Alexander Mordvintsev.
In Distill.

Workshop papers

Substance and Style: domain-specific languages for mathematical diagrams
Wode Ni*, Katherine Ye*, Joshua Sunshine, Jonathan Aldrich, and Keenan Crane. (*equal contribution)
In DSLDI '17 (co-located with SPLASH).

Designing extensible, domain-specific languages for mathematical diagrams
Katherine Ye, Keenan Crane, Jonathan Aldrich, and Joshua Sunshine.
In Off the Beaten Track ’17 (co-located with POPL).

Technical reports

The Notorious PRG: Formal verification of the HMAC-DRBG pseudorandom number generator
Senior thesis. Advised by Andrew W. Appel and Matthew Green.
Joint work with Adam Petcher, Lennart Beringer, and Naphat Sanguansin.

Testing typed functional programs and re-synthesizing them
Katherine Ye, advised by David Walker. Junior paper.

Reviewing

Work experience

Mentoring

I've been lucky to mentor many great undergraduate/masters students working on Penrose, including Dor Ma'ayan, Lily Shellhammer, Rain Du, Stella Trout, and Max Krieger. I've also been lucky to mentor/collaborate with PhD students like Nimo Ni and Jenna Wise. We are always looking for excellent students and researchers. If you are interested in joining the Penrose team, check out our jobs page.