Andrew Blinn

Vision

I use semantic theory to design contextual, conversational, and compositional interfaces,
trying to make working with abstraction & complexity more accessible, tangible, and fun.

Focuses

Programming Languages + Liveness + Learning · Human-Computer Interaction

Papers

Syntactic Completions with Material Obligations ·OOPSLA ·2025

David Moon, Andrew Blinn, Thomas Porter, Cyrus Omar

Statically Contextualizing Large Language Models with Typed Holes ·OOPSLA ·2024

Andrew Blinn, Kevin Li, June Hyung Kim, Cyrus Omar

Total Type Error Localization and Recovery with Holes ·POPL ·2024

Eric Zhao, Raef Maroof, Anand Dukkipati, Andrew Blinn, Zoe Pan, Cyrus Omar

Gradual Structure Editing with Obligations ·VL/HCC ·2023

David Moon, Andrew Blinn, Cyrus Omar

An Integrative Human-Centered Architecture for Interactive Programming Assistants ·VL/HCC ·2022

Andrew Blinn, David Moon, Eric Griffis, Cyrus Omar (addendum formalizing suggestion sensibility)

Filling Typed Holes with Live GUIs ·PLDI ·2021

Cyrus Omar, David Moon, Andrew Blinn, Ian Voysey, Nick Collins, Ravi Chugh

Workshop Papers

Toward a Live, Rich, Composable, and Collaborative Planetary Compute Engine ·PROPL ·2024

Alexander Bandukwala, Andrew Blinn, Cyrus Omar

Tylr - A Tiny Tile-based Structure Editor ·TyDe ·2022

David Moon, Andrew Blinn, Cyrus Omar

School

University of Michigan / FPLab ·Ph.D Candidate (ABD), Computer Science ·Now

Researching code context enrichment for humans & LLMs, advised by Cyrus Omar.
Lead engineer on the Hazel IDE, deployed to hundreds of students + external researchers

University of Michigan ·Master's of Science, Computer Science ·2023

Coursework in PL theory, program synthesis, category theory, HCI, & the psychology of learning

University of Toronto ·H.B.Sc, Mathematics & Computer Science ·2019

Graduate coursework in abstract algebra, compilers, and computer graphics.
Built Fructure and Containment Patterns as independent study advised by Gary Baumgartner.
Researched variational analysis of SPLs with Marsha Chechik & Ramy Shanin, including SpyShare.

Funding

ARIA Safeguarded AI ·Lead Co-Investigator on Research Grant ·2025 - Now

Researching and prototyping an orchestration layer & computational commons to support
collaboration with autonomous AI researchers on safety-critical cyberphysical applications

Industry

TODAQ Toronto ·Full-stack development in Clojure ·2019 - 2020 (2 years)

Designed new front-end interfaces to sharpen the materiality of distributed digital assets.
Implemented core back-end features for a decentralized digital asset management protocol

Speaking

Invited speaker at RacketCon ·2019 ·Salt Lake City ·Recorded Talk ·Slides

Introduced Fructure, a prototype structured interaction engine for edit-time term-rewriting

Accepted speaker at OOPSLA ·2024 ·Los Angeles ·Recorded Talk ·Slides

Presented work on providing semantic context to language models using typed holes

Accepted speaker at Midwest PL Summit ·2023 ·Ann Arbor ·Slides

Progress report on type-directed prompt construction for LLM-powered code completion

Accepted speaker at VL/HCC ·2022 ·Rome ·Recorded Talk ·Slides

Presented an integrative human-centered architecture for interactive programming assistants

Guest Lecturer ·2023 & 2022 ·University of Michigan ·2023 talk ·2022 talk

Introduction to metaprogramming featuring Racket for EECS490 - Programming Languages

Conferences

Programming Committee Member · 2025 LIVE + HATRA · 2024 LIVE + Onward! + HATRA

Student Volunteer · 2021 SPLASH/OOPSLA

Seat Filler · 2025 ARIA Safeguarded AI Summit x2 + Ink & Switch London Social

2024 Ink & Switch Unconf + OOPSLA + LIVE + HATRA + Gradient Retreat

2023 MWPLS + Local First + Fission TrainJam + Strange Loop + Gradient Retreat + Causal Islands

2020 - 2022 VL/HCC + Gradient Retreat + SPLASH/OOPSLA + HATRA + LIVE

2018 - 2019 Racket Summer School + Clojure North + OPLSS + ICFP + Strange Loop + RacketCon

Teaching

Course Development ·2022 - Now ·University of Michigan

Led engineering on the Hazel software exercises platform; developed assignments for EECS490

Course Development ·Summer 2018 ·University of Toronto

Designed course materials for CSC324 including mini algebraic stepper + pattern matching language

Teaching Assistantship ·2018 - Now ·Universities of Michigan & Toronto

2023, 2022, 2021	University of Michigan	EECS490: Programming Languages
2019, 2x 2018, 2017	University of Toronto	CSC324: Principles of Programming Languages
2018	University of Toronto	CSC104: Introduction to Computational Thinking

Mentorship

Russell Rozenbaum & Cyrus Desai — Structured editing for LLMs ·2024 - Now

Enriching agentic AI coding harnesses with contextual semantic editing actions

June (Jacob) Kim — Typed hole filling with LLMs in TypeScript ·2024 - 2025

Extracting semantic context for prompt construction using the TypeScript language server

Xiang (Kevin) Li — Type-constrained LLM code completion via token masking ·2023 - 2024

Modifying LLM decoding to enforce semantic as well as syntactic invariants

Zachary Eichenberger & Eric Fan — Semantic editing + deep reinforcement learning ·2021 - 2023

Typed structured editing for RL using graph neural networks; co-mentorship with Ethan Brooks

Yash Gaitonde — Interfaces for live feedback in teaching IDEs ·2021 - 2022

Implementing live test feedback in the Hazel IDE, deployed to a class of 100 undergraduates

Mousefeel Research

Investigations in adding juice and gamefeel to algebraic user interfaces ·2022 - Now

Figuring out how tangibility impacts explorability in math and coding with nool and furl