By Julia Renner

Computer science majors Nicholas Rioux ’18 and Dustin Jamner ’19 didn’t wait until college to start exploring their interests within programming. Now, that drive and curiosity is paying off as both of them complete co-ops in Professor Amal Ahmed’s Programming Language Lab.

“I taught myself programming as a kid,” Rioux says, “and found it was a good way of exercising my problem-solving skills…at the same time, I actually see programming as an outlet for creativity.” He came to Northeastern knowing he wanted to be involved with computer science research and connected with Professor Ahmed while she was teaching his Fundamentals of Computer Science course, asking whether she would be interested in helping him get involved with research. “She ended up putting a lot of her time into meeting each week, teaching me about what she does, and talking about various academic papers with her,” he says. This is now his second co-op with Ahmed.

Jamner, too, became interested in programming at an early age, when he took a one-week introductory course in middle school and was immediately hooked. “One of the nice things about computer science is that when you want to learn how things work, you don’t need a textbook,” he says. “You can just write a program and see what happens.” He spoke with computer science researchers at all the colleges he was accepted at, and connected with Professor Ahmed at Northeastern to see whether she would be interested in working with him. “She was very much receptive,” he says, and he began working with her during his second semester of first-year. He also took a graduate-level seminar she taught during his first semester, reading and presenting research papers on state-of-the-art programming language research, which he calls “a really amazing experience.” He spent that May and June doing full-time research with her, and when it came time for him to begin his first co-op, he expressed interest in a position in Professor Ahmed’s lab.

Professor Ahmed’s lab, Jamner explains, works on programming language research, both developing new programming languages and working on language features to improve the languages they develop. “Our goal is to come up with things for programmers to use, and to improve important things about the tools they already use,” he says. Professor Ahmed’s lab works with compilers—translators that convert the high-level code that humans write into low-level code that computers can run. “I’m studying techniques for ensuring that compilers are correct,” Rioux says. Jamner is currently collaborating with one of Professor Ahmed’s students, writing a paper on the state of programming languages in the field.

“I’m pretty set in my general goals—I consider this a long-term career that I’m going to stick with, and I knew that before I started co-op,” Jamner says. Co-op, though, has expanded his horizons, giving him the chance to dive into subjects he hasn’t worked with in detail. Rioux plans on applying to PhD programs in computer science after graduating, saying that “working with Professor Ahmed has made me realize that I want to pursue a research career.”

The best part of his co-op experience, Rioux says, has been “the independence to work on my own project…I have come up with a new mathematical technique for proving certain kinds of properties, and was given a ton of freedom to work it out according to my own ideas.” Meanwhile, Jamner has enjoyed the chance to work on and discuss “really interesting, complex ideas” with his colleagues. “A lot of people picture computer science as this isolated thing, but it’s a collaboration,” Jamner explains. “You sit down with other people and discuss the problems you’re facing and how to solve them. You try to discuss things as a group because that’s when you get the best insights.” Rioux agrees, saying that Professor Ahmed and others in the lab have been a valuable resource. He adds that “people who work in computer science are too often thought of as strictly analytical and mathematical people. They aren’t given enough credit for the creativity it takes.”