Nicolas van Kempen
LightNews LightNews
banner
nicovank.bsky.social
Nicolas van Kempen
@nicovank.bsky.social
5 followers 12 following 10 posts
PhD student at UMass Amherst. Systems, programming languages, low-level performance.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Nicolas van Kempen
manningcics.bsky.social
A new AI-powered debugging tool developed by #ManningCICS PhD students Kyla Levin and Nicolas van Kempen and Professor Emery Berger integrates LLMs into a conversational interface to help programmers diagnose and resolve software bugs more efficiently.

Read more: bit.ly/41wQdaa
August 6, 2025 at 5:33 PM
nicovank.bsky.social
At #OSDI2025!
July 8, 2025 at 8:54 PM
nicovank.bsky.social
Just opened @maxhuibai.bsky.social's game, hoping to get better reviews in the game than IRL…
Picture of a board game titled "The Publish or Perish Game: A Humorous Party Game About Academic Publishing".
May 29, 2025 at 8:33 PM
nicovank.bsky.social
East coast powder day.
Picture from a ski lift showing a slope with extremely thin cover.
April 4, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Nicolas van Kempen
emeryberger.bsky.social
Norway, here we come! ChatDBG and CoverUp to appear at FSE 2025. github.com/plasma-umass... and github.com/plasma-umass... - AI-assisted debugging and automatic high coverage unit tests!
GitHub - plasma-umass/ChatDBG: ChatDBG - AI-assisted debugging. Uses AI to answer 'why'
ChatDBG - AI-assisted debugging. Uses AI to answer 'why' - plasma-umass/ChatDBG
github.com
April 2, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Reposted by Nicolas van Kempen
manningcics.bsky.social
Proud to celebrate Professor Emeritus Andrew Barto and alumnus Richard Sutton, who received the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for establishing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning, a cornerstone of modern AI research.

Read more: brnw.ch/21wR7jr

#UMassAmhert #UAlberta
March 5, 2025 at 11:20 AM
nicovank.bsky.social
One more TurboTax ad and I'm losing it.
February 1, 2025 at 1:57 AM
nicovank.bsky.social
We have Central Park at home:
A French parking building named "Central Parc".
January 6, 2025 at 10:51 AM
Reposted by Nicolas van Kempen
theonion.com
Man Says ‘Fuck It,’ Eats Lunch At 10:58 A.M.
theonion.com/man-says-fuc...
Man Says ‘Fuck It,’ Eats Lunch At 10:58 A.M. -The Onion
December 18, 2024 at 4:57 PM
nicovank.bsky.social
Piano has been untouched since 1791.
A piano with a sign on it: "PLEASE DO NOT PLAY PIANO UNLESS YOUR NAME IS WOLFGANG".
December 14, 2024 at 7:12 PM
Reposted by Nicolas van Kempen
emeryberger.bsky.social
It's Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages
arxiv.org/abs/2410.05460 @nicovank.bsky.social
It's Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages, by Nicolas van Kempen, Hyuk-Je Kwon, Dung Tuan Nguyen, and Emery Berger, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst "It's Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages" Nicolas van Kempen, Hyuk-Je Kwon, Dung Tuan Nguyen, Emery D. Berger Does the choice of programming language affect energy consumption? Previous highly visible studies have established associations between certain programming languages and energy consumption. A causal misinterpretation of this work has led academics and industry leaders to use or support certain languages based on their claimed impact on energy consumption. This paper tackles this causal question directly. It first corrects and improves the measurement methodology used by prior work. It then develops a detailed causal model capturing the complex relationship between programming language choice and energy consumption. This model identifies and incorporates several critical but previously overlooked factors that affect energy usage. These factors, such as distinguishing programming languages from their implementations, the impact of the application implementations themselves, the number of active cores, and memory activity, can significantly skew energy consumption measurements if not accounted for. We show -- via empirical experiments, improved methodology, and careful examination of anomalies -- that when these factors are controlled for, notable discrepancies in prior work vanish. Our analysis suggests that the choice of programming language implementation has no significant impact on energy consumption beyond execution time.
December 11, 2024 at 3:30 PM
nicovank.bsky.social
Reviewers when they read my paper:
Bart Simpson acting blind with sunglasses and a cane.
December 10, 2024 at 11:04 PM
nicovank.bsky.social
Reducing CO₂ emissions with faster software: pythonspeed.com/articles/co2...

TLDR: 1. compute less (a.k.a. improve performance), 2. run on multiple cores, and 3. if the code won't run often, these concerns aren't important.
December 9, 2024 at 8:03 PM