Kathryn McKinley

Distinguished Software Engineer, Google · 1 appearance on the record.

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scientistengineeracademiccs.utexas.edu/~mckinley ↗Wikipedia ↗

Kathryn McKinley is a computer scientist known for foundational research in compilers, programming languages, and memory management systems, including the Hoard memory allocator and Immix garbage collector. Prior to Google, she was an Endowed Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research.

6statements → 4claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 2.17/5average debate potential →

3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 2 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Kathryn argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Governments occasionally degrade GPS sensor accuracy intentionally, says Kathryn McKinley

“Occasionally your government will make the sensors bad on purpose.”

Kathryn McKinley Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 0:57 Kathryn McKinley

How they sound: speaking style how? →

204 words/min while actually speaking · 14.5 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Kathryn McKinley: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,481 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said6 Episodes1

Everything Kathryn McKinley said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported

Governments occasionally degrade GPS sensor accuracy intentionally, says Kathryn McKinley

“Occasionally your government will make the sensors bad on purpose.”

Kathryn McKinley Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 0:57 Kathryn McKinley

Insight

Developers lack programming models for probabilistic ML outputs, says Kathryn McKinley

“Image understanding and all sorts of applications we're using today aren't giving us perfect answers, yet we don't have the tools to interpret those answers. We don't have the programming models”

Kathryn McKinley Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 1:45 Kathryn McKinley

Assertion Supported

Phone users are least likely to be directly under the GPS dot

“When you see that little dot on your phone, you're actually least likely to be there. The GPS error is, looks like a doughnut. It's a Rowley distribution, so you're actually likely to be in a little circle around where that dot is, alright?”

Kathryn McKinley Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 4:31 Kathryn McKinley

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Uncertain<T> reduces GPS road-snapping code from thousands of lines to two

“But what used to take thousands of lines of code now takes two.”

Kathryn McKinley Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 12:55 Kathryn McKinley

Insight

Traditional software assertions fail for probabilistic computing, requiring new approaches

“Well, now we have a, ah, traditional assertions can't do that, and so we have a new way to do this with a probabilistic assertion.”

Kathryn McKinley Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 14:21 Kathryn McKinley

Assertion Supported

Formal proof of differential privacy implementations remains unsolved, says Kathryn McKinley

“And so we've come, we've taken some good steps in this direction. But we haven't done the very hardest step, which is to prove in the implementation of differential privacy that you actually get it.”

Kathryn McKinley Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 15:25 Kathryn McKinley

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
Kathryn McKinley	Jul 28, 2017	15m

Kathryn McKinley

The record, in short

Their most notable supported claim

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

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