Monica S. Lam 

Biography

Professor Lam's current research is on creating trustworthy and effective virtual assistants based on Large Language Models (LLMs). She is also an expert in compilers for high-performance machines. Her pioneering work of affine partitioning provides a unifying theory to the field of loop transformations for parallelism and locality. Her software pipelining algorithm is used in commercial systems for instruction level parallelism. Her research team created the first, widely adopted research compiler, SUIF. Her contributions in computer architecture include the CMU Warp Systolic Array and the Stanford DASH Distributed Memory Multiprocessor. She was on the founding team of Tensilica, now a part of Cadence.

She received an NSF Young Investigator award in 1992. She was the author of two of the papers in "20 Years of PLDI--a Selection (1979-1999)", and one paper in the "25 Years of the International Symposia on Computer Architecture". She received the ACM Most Influential Programming Language Design and Implementation Paper Award in 2001, an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in 2002, the ACM Programming Language Design and Implementation Best Paper Award in 2004, the ACM SIGARCH/SIGPLAN/SIGOPS ASPLOS Influential Paper Awards in two consecutive years, 2021 and 2022.

Professor Lam received the University of British Columbia Computer Science 50th Anniversary Research Award in 2018. Her decentralized, privacy-preserving Almond virtual assistant received Popular Science's Best of What's New Award in Security in 2019. Her research on eliminating Large Language Model hallucination, by grounding in Wikipedia, received a Wikimedia Foundation's Research of the Year Award in 2024.

Recent Presentations and Interviews

Research Interests

Current Research

Previous Research Projects

Current PhD Students

Ph.D. Graduates

Recent Papers

1. SPAGHETTI: Open-Domain Question Answering from Heterogeneous Data Sources with Retrieval and Semantic Parsing
   Heidi C. Zhang, Sina J. Semnani, Farhad Ghassemi, Jialiang Xu, Shicheng Liu, Monica S. Lam
   In Findings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Bangkok, Thailand, August 11-16, 2024.
2. Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models
   Yijia Shao, Yucheng Jiang, Theodore A. Kanell, Peter Xu, Omar Khattab, Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of the North American Chapter of Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Mexico City, Mexico, June 16–21, 2024.
3. SUQL: Conversational Search over Structured and Unstructured Data with Large Language Models
   Shicheng Liu, Jialiang Xu, Wesley Tjangnaka, Sina J. Semnani, Chen Jie Yu, Monica S. Lam
   In Findings of the North American Chapter of Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Mexico City, Mexico, June 16–21, 2024.
4. ReactGenie: A Development Framework for Rich Multimodal Interactions Using Large Language Models
   Jackie (Junrui) Yang, Yingtian Shi, Yuhan Zhang, Karina Li, Daniel Wan Rosli, Anisha Jain, Shuning Zhang, Tianshi Li, James A. Landay, Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24), Honolulu, HI, USA, May 11–16, 2024.
5. AMMA: Adaptive Multimodal Assistants Through Automated State Tracking and User Model-Directed Guidance Planning
   Jackie (Junrui) Yang, Leping Qiu, Emmanuel Corona-Moreno, Louisa Shi, Hung Bui, Monica S. Lam, James A. Landay
   In 2024 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), Orlando, FL, March 16-21, 2024.
6. Fine-tuned LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less with Few-Shot Sequence-to-Sequence Semantic Parsing over Wikidata
   Silei Xu*, Shicheng Liu*, Theo Culhane, Elizaveta Pertseva, Meng-Hsi Wu, Sina J. Semnani, Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, Singapore, December 6-10, 2023.
7. WikiChat: Stopping the Hallucination of Large Language Model Chatbots by Few-Shot Grounding on Wikipedia
   Sina J. Semnani, Violet Z. Yao*, Heidi C. Zhang*, Monica S. Lam
   In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, Singapore, December 6-10, 2023.
8. X-RiSAWOZ: High-Quality End-to-End Multilingual Dialogue Datasets and Few-shot Agents
   Mehrad Moradshahi*, Tianhao Shen*, Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury, Gael de Chalendar, Anmol Goel, Sungkyun Kim, Prashant Kodali, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Nasredine Semmar, Sina Semnani, Jiwon Seo, Vivek Seshadri, Manish Shrivastava, Michael Sun, Aditya Yadavalli, Chaobin You, Deyi Xiong, Monica S. Lam
   In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.
9. Zero and Few-Shot Localization of Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents with a Distilled Representation
   Mehrad Moradshahi, Sina Semnani, Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Dubrovnik, Croatia, May 2-6 2023.
10. Contextual Semantic Parsing for Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogues
    Mehrad Moradshahi, Victoria C. Tsai, Giovanni Campagna, Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), Dubrovnik, Croatia, May 2023.
11. HomeView: Automatically Building Smart Home Digital Twins With Augmented Reality Headsets
    Zhuoyue Lyu, Jackie (Junrui) Yang, Monica S. Lam, James A. Landay
    In Adjunct Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Bend, Oregon, October 2022.
12. A Few-Shot Semantic Parser for Wizard-of-Oz Dialogues with the Precise ThingTalk Representation
    Giovanni Campagna, Sina J. Semnani, Ryan Kearns, Lucas Jun Koba Sato, Monica S. Lam
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistic1s (ACL), Dublin, Ireland, July 2022.
13. HybridTrak: Adding Full-Body Tracking to VR Using and Off-the-Shelf Webcam
    Jackie (Junrui) Yang, Tuochao Chen, Fang Qin, Monica S. Lam, James A. Landay
    In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New Orleans, LA, April 2022.
14. DIY Assistant: A Multi-Modal End-User Programmable Virtual Assistant
    Michael H. Fischer, Giovanni Campagna, Euirim Choi, Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2021),June 2021.
15. Grounding Open-Domain Instructions to Automate Web Support Tasks
    Nancy Xu, Sam Masling, Michael Du, Giovanni Campagna, Larry Heck, James Landay, Monica S Lam
    In Proceedings of the 2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2021), June 2021.
16. AutoQA: From Databases To Q&A Semantic Parsers With Only Synthetic Training Data
    Silei Xu, Sina J. Semnani, Giovanni Campagna, Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, November 2020.
17. Localizing Open-Ontology QA Semantic Parsers in a Day Using Machine Translation
    Mehrad Moradshahi, Giovanni Campagna, Sina J. Semnani, Silei Xu, Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, November 2020.
18. DoThisHere: Multimodal Interaction to Improve Cross-Application Tasks on Mobile Devices
    Jackie Yang, Monica S. Lam, James A. Landay
    In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), October 2020.
19. Schema2QA: High-Quality and Low-Cost Q&A Agents for the Structured Web
    Silei Xu, Giovanni Campagna, Jian Li, and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, October 2020.
20. Zero-Shot Transfer Learning with Synthesized Data for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking
    Giovanni Campagna, Agata Foryciarz, Mehrad Moradshahi, and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), July 2020.
21. Soundr: Head Position and Orientation Using a Microphone Array
    Jackie (Junrui) Yang, Gaurab Banerjee, Vishesh Gupta, Monica S. Lam, James A. Landay
    In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
    Honolulu, HI, April 2020.
    
22. ImagineNet: Restyling Apps Using Neural Style Transfer
    Michael H. Fischer, Richard R. Yang, Monica S. Lam
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.04932, January 2020.
23. Protecting privacy and open competition with almond: an open-source virtual assistant
    Monica S. Lam, Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, Michael Fischer, Mehrad Moradshahi
    XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, Vol. 26, Issue 1, September 2019
24. Genie: A Generator of Natural Language Semantic Parsers for Virtual Assistant Commands
    Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, Mehrad Moradshahi, Richard Socher, and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation,
    Pheonix, AZ, June 2019.
    
25. Controlling Fine-Grain Sharing in Natural Language with a Virtual Assistant
    Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, Rakesh Ramesh, Michael Fischer, and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT),
    Singapore, October 2018.
    
26. Brassau: Automatically Generating Graphical User Interfaces for Virtual Assistants
    Michael Fischer, Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, and Monica S. Lam
    In 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. (MobileHCI),
    Barcelona, Spain, September 2018.
27. Almond: The Architecture of an Open, Crowdsourced, Privacy-Preserving, Programmable Virtual Assistant
    Giovanni Campagna, Rakesh Ramesh, Silei Xu, Michael Fischer, and Monica S. Lam.
    In Proceedings of the 26th World Wide Web Conference,
    Perth, Australia, April 2017.
    

Selected Publications

1. Musubi: Disintermediated Interactive Social Feeds for Mobile Devices
   Ben Dodson, Ian Vo, T. J. Purtell, Aemon Cannon, and Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of the 21st International WWW Conference (WWW2012)
   Lyon, France, April 2012. (Finalist of Best Student Paper).
   
2. Email Clients as Decentralized Social Apps in Mr. Privacy
   Michael Fischer, T. J. Purtell, and Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of the 4th Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs 2011)
   Waterloo ON, Canada, July 2011.
   

3. SociaLite: An Efficient Graph Query Language Based on Datalog
   Jiwon Seo, Stephen Guo, and Monica S. Lam
   In IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 99, February 2015.
4. Distributed SociaLite: A Datalog-Based Language for Large-Scale Graph Analysis
   Jiwon Seo, Jongsoo Park, Jaeho Shin, and Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of 40th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Hangzhou, China, August 2013.

5. Historical Research Using Email Archives
   Sudheendra Hangal, Vihari Piratla, Chaiyasit Manovit, Peter Chan, Glynn Edwards, Monica S. Lam
   In CHI-2015 Case Studies: ACM Computer Human Interaction
   Seoul, Korea, April 2015.
6. Effect Of Phonemic Cuing On Recall Of Personally Relevant Names Derived From Email
   Allyson C. Rosen, Ankit Mathur, Monica S. Lam, Sudheendra Hangal
   Poster at the 2015 International Neuropsychological Society Annual Meeting
   Denver, CO, February 2015.
7. Personalized Memory Testing for Names Using Email Archives
   Sudheendra Hangal, Allyson C. Rosen, Ankit Mathur, Monica S. Lam
   In BrainKDD: International Workhop on Data Mining for Brain Science, in conjunction with ACM SIGKDD'14, New York City, August 2014.
8. Effective Browsing and Serendipitous Discovery with an Experience-Infused Browser
   Sudheendra Hangal, Abhinay Nagpal, and Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)
   Lisbon, Portugal, February 2012.
   
9. Friends, Romans, Countrymen: Lend me your URLs. Using Social Chatter to Personalize Web Search.
   Abhinay Nagpal, Sudheendra Hangal, Rifat Reza Joyee, and Monica S. Lam
   In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
   Seattle WA, February 2012.
   
10. MUSE: Reviving Memories Using Email Archives
    Sudheendra Hangal, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
    In Proceedings of the 24th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)
    Santa Barbara CA, October 2011.
    
11. An Algorithm and Analysis of Social Topologies from Email and Photo Tags
    T. J. Purtell, Diana MacLean, Seng Keat Teh, Sudheendra Hangal, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
    In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis
    Held in conjunction with the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
    San Diego, CA, August 2011.
    
12. Groups Without Tears: Mining Social Topologies from Email
    Diana MacLean, Sudheendra Hangal, Seng Keat Teh, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
    In Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), Palo Alto, CA, February 2011.
    

13. The Collective: A Cache-Based System Management Architecture
    R. Chandra, N. Zeldovich, C. P. Sapuntzakis and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the Second Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, May 2005.
14. The Interactive Performance of SLIM: A Stateless, Thin-Client Architecture
    B. K. Schmidt, M. S. Lam, and J. D. Northcutt
    In Proceedings of the Seventeenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, December 1999.
    Published as Operating Systems Review, 34(5):32-47.

15. Automatic Generation of XSS and SQL Injection Attacks with Goal-Directed Model Checking.
    Martin, Michael C., Lam, M. S.
    In Proceedings of the 17^th USENIX Security Symposium, (San Jose, CA, 30 July-1 August, 2008), pages 31-43.
16. Securing Web Applications Using Static and Dynamic Information Flow Tracking,
    M. S. Lam, M.C. Martin, V. B. Livshits, and J. Whaley,
    In ACM Sigplan 2008 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation, (Keynote address), January 2008.
17. Finding Application Errors and Security Flaws Using PQL: a Program Query Language.
    Michael Martin, V. Benjamin Livshits, and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA '05), October 2005.
18. Finding Security Vulnerabilities in Java Applications Using Static Analysis
    V. Benjamin Livshits and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 14th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2005.
19. Static Detection of Leaks in Polymorphic Containers.
    David Heine and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceeding of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, (Shanghai, China, 20-28 May, 2006), pages 252-261.
20. Context-Sensitive Program Analysis as Database Queries
    Monica S. Lam, John Whaley, V. Benjamin Livshits, Michael C. Martin, Dzintars Avots, Michael Carbin and Christopher Unkel.
    In Proceedings of the 24th SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, June, 2005. (Invited Tutorial).
21. Cloning-Based Context-Sensitive Pointer Alias Analysis Using Binary Decision Diagrams
    John Whaley and Monica S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2004 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June 2004.
    ACM Programming Language Design and Implementation Best Paper Award, 2004.
22. A Practical Flow-Sensitive and Context-Sensitive C and C++ Memory Leak Detector
    D. L. Heine and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June 2003.
23. Tracking Down Software Bugs Using Automatic Anomaly Detection
    S. Hangal and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 2002.(gzip'ed postscript).

24. Interprocedural Parallelization Analysis in SUIF,
    M. W. Hall, S. P. Amarasinghe, B. R. Murphy, S.-W. Liao, and M. S. Lam,
    ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, July 2005, 27(4), pp. 662-731.
25. Blocking and Array Contraction Across Arbitrarily Nested Loops Using Affine Partitioning
    A. W. Lim, S.-W. Liao and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, June 2001.
26. An Affine Partitioning Algorithm to Maximize Parallelism and Minimize Communication
    A. W. Lim, G. I. Cheong and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGARCH International Conference on Supercomputing, June, 1999, pp. 228-237.
27. Maximizing Parallelism and Minimizing Synchronization with Affine Partitions
    A. W. Lim and M. S. Lam
    Parallel Computing, Vol. 24, Issue 3-4, May 1998, Pages 445-475. (PDF)
    (A preliminary version appeared as Maximizing Parallelism and Minimizing Synchronization with Affine Transform, in the Conference Record of the 24th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, January, 1997.)
28. Maximizing Multiprocessor Performance with the SUIF Compiler
    M. W. Hall, J. M. Anderson, S. P. Amarasinghe, B. R. Murphy, S.-W. Liao, E. Bugnion and M. S. Lam
    IEEE Computer, December 1996.
    (A special issue on multiprocessors).
29. Detecting Coarse-Grain Parallelism Using an Interprocedural Parallelizing Compiler (PostScript)
    M. W. Hall, S. P. Amarasinghe, B. R. Murphy, S. Liao, and M. S. Lam,
    In Proceedings of Supercomputing '95, December 1995.
30. Global Optimizations for Parallelism and Locality on Scalable Parallel Machines (PostScript)
    J. M. Anderson and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN'93 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June, 1993.
31. Design and Evaluation of a Compiler Algorithm for Prefetching ( PDF)
    T. C. Mowry, M. S. Lam and A. Gupta
    In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, October, 1992.
    ACM SIGARCH/SIGPLAN/SIGOPS ASPLOS Influential Paper Award, 2022.
32. A Data Locality Optimizing Algorithm
    M. E. Wolf and M. S. Lam
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN'91 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June 1991.
    ACM Most Influential PLDI Paper Award, 2001.
    Included in 20 Years of PLDI (1979-1999): A Selection, 2004. (A retrospective).
33. Software Pipelining: An Effective Scheduling Technique for VLIW Machines.
    M. Lam.
    In Proceedings of the SIGPLAN 88 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June 1988, pp. 318-328.
    Included in 20 Years of PLDI (1979-1999): A Selection, 2004. (A retrospective).

34. Limits of Control Flow on Parallelism (PostScript)
    M. S. Lam and R. P. Wilson
    In Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, May, 1992.
35. The Stanford DASH Multiprocessor
    D. Lenoski, J. Laudon, K. Gharachorloo, W.-D. Weber, A. Gupta, J. L. Hennessy, M. Horowitz, and M. S. Lam.
    IEEE Computer. 25, (3): 63-79, March, 1992.
36. The Cache Performance and Optimizations of Blocked Algorithms
    M. S. Lam, E. E. Rothberg and M. E. Wolf
    In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, April 1991.
    ACM SIGARCH/SIGPLAN/SIGOPS ASPLOS Influential Paper Award, 2021.
37. The Warp Computer: Architecture, Implementation and Performance.
    M. Annaratone, E. Arnould, T. Gross, H. T. Kung, M. Lam, and O. Menzilcioglu
    IEEE Transactions on Computers, December 1987, C-36, 12, pp. 1523-1538.
    (A preliminary version appeared as Warp Architecture and Implementation, which appeared in the Proceedings of the 13^th Annual Symposium on Computer Architecture, (Tokyo, Japan, 2-5 June 1986). pp. 346-356.
    Included in 25 Years of the International Symposia on Computer Architecture, 2008.)

• The Almond open-source and user-programmable virtual assistant project
• MobiSocial Computing Group Home Page
• The SUIF Research Group Home Page
• The Collective Research Group Home Page
• Curriculum Vitae