معرفی
Heather Miller is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Software and Societal Systems Department within Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. Her academic journey includes prior roles as an Assistant Clinical Professor at Northeastern University's College of Computer and Information Science and as Executive Director of the Scala Center at EPFL.
Miller's research centers on distributed and concurrent computation through the lens of programming languages, with particular emphasis on data-centric systems, big data processing, and edge computing. A defining theme throughout her work is composability - enabling construction of complex distributed systems through composition of components that are correct by construction. Her projects span distributable closures, flexible serialization techniques, futures and promises for asynchronous programming, and deterministic concurrent dataflow models.
Her recent publications demonstrate strong trends in applying programming language theory to practical distributed systems challenges, with increasing focus on WebAssembly instrumentation, microservice resilience, and language model pipelines. This evolution reflects her commitment to bridging theoretical foundations with real-world system requirements.
- Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize (2023)
Mentorship forms a significant component of Miller's academic work. She actively supervises multiple PhD, MS, and undergraduate researchers at CMU, including Christopher Meiklejohn, Matthew Weidner, Huairui Qui, Ria Pradeep, and Luke Dramko. Her service contributions span numerous top-tier conferences including PLDI, SPLASH, ECOOP, and ICSE where she has served as committee member, chair, and keynote speaker. Miller co-founded the Curry On conference to foster industry-academia dialogue, hosting successful editions in Prague, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and London.
She leads research groups focused on distributed programming models and maintains strong industry connections through Two Sigma, where she holds an affiliation. Her work consistently emphasizes practical open-source implementations, primarily within the Scala ecosystem where she's been a core contributor since 2011.
