Andrew Cheung (he/him)

Andrew, his mom, and his grandma

photo: me with two of my biggest inspirations -- my mom and my grandma!


Hi! I’m Andrew, an incoming PhD student at UC San Diego’s CSE department. I’ll be working in the Programming Systems group!

Before UCSD, I got my master’s and bachelor’s at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. I was advised by Zachary Tatlock and mentored by Gus Smith in the PLSE lab!

Are you a UCSD undergrad/master’s student interested in research? Let’s chat – I don’t bite!

Research

In general, my research motivation is to make it easier to write tricky code1.

Right now, I’m at Synopsys, where I’m exploring this goal in the context of hardware design. Specifically, I’m looking at how to use equality saturation to make maintaining hardware tools easier.

At UW, I worked with Zach, Gus, and many others on projects which worked toward the same goal. Here are some of them:

  • Lakeroad (ASPLOS 2024) is a hardware compilation tool which uses program synthesis to compile high-level hardware snippets to FPGA primitives.

  • Cookie (ICFP 2023) is an evaluation framework which rigorously tests FPGA compilation tools on their ability to technology map their designs. This won first place at ICFP’s Student Research Competition!

  • Gator was my master’s thesis project. It was a Lakeroad offshoot which aimed to use solvers to create correct-by-construction hardware compilers. I gave a talk on this work here. I don’t think I actually got it to work, but I learned a lot about program synthesis!

  • 3LA (TODAES 2023) is a project which makes it easier for developers to perform end-to-end evaluations of their accelerators.

Alongside these projects, I also interned at Intel Labs in 2023, where I used formal verification tools to verify the correctness of part of an accelerator.

Other Stuff

In addition to research, I have a strong passion for teaching and CS education. Back at UW, I was with the TA program for the intro sequence for 5 years! One of my favorite jobs was being the TA Coordinator for the intro sequence, where I led over 100 TAs and interviewed, hired, and trained our quarterly cohort of new TAs alongside the amazing Chloe Fong.

Some highlights:

  • Here’s a picture of us from Spring 2023 (I’m in the middle wearing the turtleneck)!

  • Here’s a documentary by Northeastern University’s Center for Inclusive Computing that highlights the world-class TA program that I’m very lucky to have been a part of.

When I’m not teaching or doing research, I like to improve my mediocre abilities as an amateur chef, programmer, and artist. Recently, I’ve discovered a love for running and lifting heavy things.

I also enjoy playing Dota, which is kind of like lifting four really heavy things at once.


  1. I stole this line from my old advisor, Zachary Tatlock. ↩

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