Academe

This page is about my academic / professional / computer-science-related interests.

Me, at Schloß Dagstuhl (image credit: M.Zalewski)

• I am very pleased to announce that I will be in Seattle this summer working at Microsoft as a developer intern. Details to come.
  UPDATE! At this point, I can at least say that I'll be working with the Visual Studio team. It looks like I'll be staying with a couple of other "Microsofties" (Surely, somebody else must have already coined this word?) in a house in Kirkland. I'm looking forward to it.
• My committee and I have agreed on a date and time for my oral qualifying examination. Details to come. My committee are:
  • Amr
  • Andy
  • Arun
  • Dan
  • Stephanie (representing Gender Studies, my minor)
  
  UPDATE! I've passed my examination. I think that it went fairly well, and I'm extremely glad to have it done. Now, I just need to finish up the paperwork.
• I've started a page for Pure2, the pure type systems interpreter that I've implemented for use in my qualifying examination presentation; the code and binaries will be available shortly.
  UPDATE! The Pure2 interpreter and some simple documentation is up.
• For the purposes of my work, "property-aware programming" has been renamed to "evolving types". Thanks to Amr for that!
• Now that the readings list is together, I am working on a committee for my qualifying examination. This should be finalised soon, at which point I'll add a list of the members (in addition to my advisers Amr and Andy At some point, perhaps I shall post the reading list also.

• Work / Academic Projects
  • BB–search for Busy Beaver continues (with B.van Heuveln, S.Bringsjord, O.Kellet, et al.)
  • Braque–a prototype property-aware programming language
  • LibCompTool–complexity analysis for simple generic programs
  • MiniKanrenCaml–O'Caml library implementing the core of MiniKanren, an adorable logic programming language
  • Motion–a simple library for scripting interpolations
  • Braque / property-aware programming (with A.Sabry, A.Lumsdaine, and P.Gottshling)
  • Pure2–a simple interpreter for the functional pure type systems
  • Seqs–theorem prover for constructive sequent calculus with unification
  • subrecursive composition languages and escapes (with T.Veldhuizen)
  • U-Space–a parser for natural-language sentences (in a small subset of English)
• Toy / Personal Projects
  • C++-Template Lambda-Calculus Interpreter (just because we can!)
  • Caml-S–System S in O'Caml
  • CamlTrax–layout for O'Caml
  • DX6–"digital flashcards" for studying vocabulary
  • Function Flow Diagrams–a type of diagram for documenting systems from afunctional perspective
  • FPk–an open-source implementation of J.Backus's FP language in O'Caml
  • KVS2–a simple version control system
  • Match–a simple utility for filtering text
  • Morphine–a typed functional language
  • NoteTex–a simple preprocessor for Latex to allow for rapid authoring of notes and outlines
  • SubCode–a lightweight, general preprocessor for embedded languages
  • SchemeS–System S in Scheme
  • SCurses–a very simple binding of curses for O'Caml
  • WebGen–the tool / language that generates my web-site
  • While'–a sub-recursive imperative language with extensible records and references

• functional programming
• pure type systems
• dependent types
• programs as proofs
• reüsable abstractions
• semantics
• language-level property manipulation

I am currently a Ph.D. student at Indiana University, Bloomington in the Department of Computer Science. I am doing my Ph.D. minor with the Department of Gender Studies. I am a member of the Open Systems Laboratory.

Apparently, this is what comp sci grad school is ... according to some people at CMU, at least ... It doesn't look so hard, does it?

mostly so that I can remember!

• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  • 2002
    • Generic Programming (D.R.Musser)
• Chalmers University of Technology
  • 2003
    • Aspect-Oriented Programming (M.Giese)
    • The Standard Template Library (S.Schupp)
  • 2004
    • Philosophies of Learning (S.Andersson)
    • Types & Programming Languages (J.Svenningsson, M.Benke)
    • The Functional Approach to Data Management (G.G.L.Kemp, P.M.D.Gray—University of Aberdeen)
    • Concurrent ML (A.Stoughton—Kansas State University)
    • Interaction Design (F.Chen, et al.)
    • Advanced Functional Programming (L.Augustsson)
• Indiana University
  • 2005
    • Automated Deduction (D.Leivant)
    • Operating Systems (A.Lumsdaine)
    • Programming Languages (D.Friedman)
  • 2006
    • Composition Languages (independent study, T.Veldhuizen)
    • Advanced Computer Graphics (A.Hanson)
    • Advanced Database Concepts (C.Wyss)
    • Advanced Programming Languages (D.Friedman)
    • Natural Language Processing (M.Gasser)
    • Quantum Computing (A.Sabry)
  • 2007
    • Logic, Belief, and Self-Reference (independent study, A.Sabry)
    • Ancient Women (K.A.Pyburn)
    • Concepts of Gender (S.Sanders)
    • Property-Aware Programming (independent study, P.Gottschling)
    • Type Systems (independent study, A.Sabry)
  • 2008
    • Gender, Medicine, & the Body (F.Malti-Douglass)
    • Logics and Type Sytsems (independent study, A.Sabry)

I am a member of the PL Group. We meet to present work, discuss problems, practise talks, etc. We now—with the blessing of our fearless leader (in the sense that it is he who coerces us into giving talks), Roshan—have a web-page that I'm maintaining. It's mostly filler for now, but you can visit it here.

• Chalmers University of Technology
  • term 1 2003-2004, term 1 2004-2005
    • Cryptography , tutor (B.von Sydow)
  • terms 3-4 2003-2004, terms 3-4 2004-2005
    • IT Project Course 3 , group supervisor (S.Schupp)

I studied animation for a bit as an undergrad. A somewhat unique PacMan animation set to Steppenwolf's _Magic Carpet Ride_ was the end result. My professor didn't think terribly highly of it, but I am rather pleased. The endless evenings, nights, and weekends in the lab with the other animation geeks comprise a particularly fond memory for me.

Katie Schaeffer & I created this game for a computer graphics course we took at RPI; we're pretty pleased with the fruits our efforts. We have a compiled version for a few operating systems. SpaceWars for GNU/Linux PPC (gzipped/tar executable) SpaceWars for GNU/Linux x86 (gzipped/tar executable) SpaceWars for Windows (zipped executable including required OpenGL libraries)

Erdös Number

P.Erdös

M.K.Goldberg

M.Krishnamoorthy

S.Schupp

K.D.P.Ross

The Erdös number, honouring the late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös, one of the most prolific writers of mathematical papers, is a way of describing the "collaborative distance", in regard to mathematical papers, between an author and Erdös.

In order to be assigned an Erdös number, an author must cowrite a mathematical paper with an author with a finite Erdös number. Paul Erdös has an Erdös number of 0. If the lowest Erdös number of a coäuthor is X, then the author's Erdös number is X + 1.

Above is the chain of authors demonstrating that my Erdös number is (at most) 4. Many thanks to Marcin for pointing me to the Schupp-Krishnamoorthy-Zalewski-Kilbride paper! –and– Here is a constructive proof of the bound:

• Erdös–Goldberg: "Cutting a Graph into Two Dissimilar Halves" (1988)
• Goldberg–Krishnamoorthy: "Finding Communities by Clustering a Graph into Overlapping Subgraphs" (2005)
• Krishnamoorthy–Schupp: "The 'Right' Level of Abstraction—Assessing Reüsable Software with Formal Concept Analysis." (2002)
• Schupp–Ross: "Rapid Performance Predictions for Library Components" (2004)

My (greetings and) apologies to any Hungarian-readers for incorrectly rendering the "o" with double acute accents as one with an umlaut. I cannot find a way to encode the former in HTML, so if anyone knows the trick(s) necessary for doing so, I would be grateful if you would mail me.

• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, undergraduate student, Dept of Computer Science, Dept of Cognitive Science (1999–2002)
  • papers
    • third year
      • "Analysis of Introsort using Operation-Counting Iterators" (pdf)
    • fourth year
      • "Report on the Use of Erlang in Distributed Computation Research" (adviser: D.R.Musser)(bzipped postscript)
      • "Generic Distribution and Filtering Algorithms" (adviser: D.R.Musser)(bzipped pdf or zipped source )
      • "Use of Optimisation Techniques in Determining Values for the Quadruplorum Variants of Rado's Busy Beaver Function" (undergraduate thesis; adviser: B.van Heuveln)(pdf)
  • talks / presentations
    • "Conquering the Busy Beaver" (04 December 2002)(pdf)
      talk at the Minds & Machines lunch seminar
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, researcher, Dept of Computer Science, Dept of Cognitive Science (2003)
  • papers
    • "A New Gödelian Argument for Hypercomputing Minds Based on the Busy Beaver Problem" (with S.Bringsjord, O.Kellett, A.Shilliday, J.Taylor, B.van Heuveln, Y.Yang, J.Baumes)(Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation, 2006)(pdf)
• Chalmers University of Technology, Ph.D. student, Dept of Computing Science; researcher Software Methodologies and Systems Group (2003–2005)
  • papers
    • "Rapid Performance Predictions for Library Components" (Proceedings of WOSP 2004, January 2004)(with S.Schupp, M.Zalewski)(external link)
    • "A Complexity Analysis for Simple Generic Programs" (Proceedings of Chalmers Winter Meeting 2005, January 2005)(pdf)
  • talks / presentations
    • "Machine Learning in Recommender Systems for Software Transformation" (11 October 2003)(pdf)
      talk at the SMS software seminar
    • "Rapid Performance Prediction for Library Components" (15 January 2004)(pdf)
      (short) talk at WOSP 2004
    • "Stratego: Strategies for Term Rewriting" (03 March 2004)(pdf)
      talk at the SMS software seminar
    • "Simulating Type Classes in C++" (28 September 2004)(pdf)
      talk at the SMS software seminar
    • "A Complexity Analysis for Simple Generic Programs" (14 January 2005)(pdf)
      talk at the Computing Science Winter Meeting
    • "A Complexity Analysis for Simple Generic Programs" (9 March 2005)(pdf)
      talk at the Dagstuhl software libraries workshop ( not the same as the previous talk with the same title)
• Indiana University, Ph.D. student, Dept of Computer Science, Dept of Gender Studies; researcher, Open Systems Laboratory (2005–present)
  • papers
    • "Writing a Lambda-Calculus-Interpreter for the Lambda-Calculus ... Without Getting Our Hands Dirty" (2006)(adviser: D.Friedman)(pdf)
    • "Towards an Automatic Complexity Analysis for Generic Programs" (Proceedings of WGP 2006, September 2006)(pdf)
    • "Motion: An interpolation / motion library for Haskell" (2006)(adviser: A.Hanson)
    • "F|LOSSin' 'n' Set Bangin': A comparative analysis of women in F|LOSS and street gangs" (2007)(adviser: K.A.Pyburn)
    • "Asexuality: Another Stripe in the Rainbow" (2007)(adviser: S.Sanders)
  • talks / presentations
    • "Adventures Parsing English –or– Where science fails and what you can do about it" (03 May 2006)
      talk at the OSL lunch talks series
    • "Towards an Automatic Complexity Analysis for Generic Programs" (28 September 2006)(pdf)
      talk at the OSL lunch talks series; very similar to talk at WGP 2006
    • "Introduction to Arrows" (9 November 2006) (introduction, arrows implementation and examples)(Haskell)
      talk for Quantum Programming Languages
    • "Motion: An interpolation / motion library for Haskell"
      talk at the OSL lunch talks series
    • "Ban Zhao" (15 February 2006)(pdf)
      talk for Ancient Women
    • "Ada Lovelace" (22 February 2006)(pdf)
      talk for Ancient Women
    • "F|LOSSin' 'n' Set Bangin': A comparative analysis of women in F|LOSS and street gangs" (26 February 2006)
      talk for Ancient Women, based on my paper for the same course
    • "Property-Aware Programming: Shades of Grey" (10 October 2007)
      talk at the OSL lunch talks series
    • "Property-Aware Programming: Shades of Grey: Part 1" (19 October 2007)
      talk at the PL group talks series (This version is significantly expanded and more technical than the previous talk of the same name.)
    • "Property-Aware Programming: Shades of Grey: Part 2" (2 November 2007)
      talk at the PL group talks series (This will conclude the previous talk at the PL group.)
    • "Evalving Types: Rectifying Computing with Reality" (23 April 2008)
      talk at the OSL lunch talks series
    • "Typed Lambda Calculi" (06 May 2008)
      talk for my oral qualifying examination

• Applications
  • DX6 (a simple vocabulary-study program) *
  • Emacs ("the extensible, customisable, self-documenting real-time display editor")
  • Firefox (fantastic web browser)
    • It's All Text (use Emacs or VI to edit text areas in your web browser)
    • Tor (browse anonymously)
      • Privoxy (non-caching proxy; you'll probably need this to use Tor, on GNU/Linux at least)
      • Tor Test Page (are you browsing through the Tor network?)
    • Zotero (fantastic research tool)
  • OpenOffice (a Free office suite with open file formats)
  • Thunderbird (mail client)
    • Enigmail (sign and encrypt mails)
    • ExternalEditor (use Emacs or VI to edit mails)
  • VLC (multiplatform video player for a lot of formats)
• LaTeX
  • Listings (package for formatting source code)
  • Lyx (graphical front-end for LaTeX)
  • NoteTex (a simple tool for rapidly writing notes) *
• Operating Systems
  • GeexBox (live MPlayer-based media-player GNU/Linux)
  • Knoppix Linux (bootable, live CD GNU/Linux)
  • Slax Linux (small, bootable, live GNU/Linux)
  • Ubuntu Linux (running on most of my machines; also available in a live version)
• Philosophy
  • Dvorak course (this is how I (re)learnt to type)
  • Free Software Foundation (yay GPL ... software wants to be free)
• Programming Languages
  • Haskell (non-strict, purely-functional language)
    • The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compiler
    • HOpenGL (very nice OpenGL bindings for Haskell
    • Motion (a library for interpolations) *
  • Morphine (my System-F-based functional language) *
  • OCaml (general-purpose functional programming language with a powerful module system and native-code compiler and an interpreter)
    • Caml-S (System S in OCaml) *
    • CamlTrax (layout for OCaml) *
    • DypGen (LGR parser-generator with positional variables)
    • Godi ("advanced programming environment" for OCaml—provides many useful libraries and packages with a painless installer system)
    • Menhir (LR(1) parser-generator with named variables)
    • KVS2 (a simple version control library; also nice for writing OCaml programs that interface with the "outside world") *
    • OCaml+TWT (layout for OCaml)
    • OCaml-Curses (curses wrapper for OCaml)
    • SCurses (simple curses wrapper for OCaml) *
  • Opium (my newest project; details coming soon) *
  • Stratego (strategy-based term rewriting)
    • Stratego Shell (a top-level for Stratego)
  • While' (sub-recursive imperative language with extensible records and references) *
• Proof Systems
  • Coq (types-based, intuitionistic proof assistant)
  • Proof General (very handy Emacs mode for Coq and other proof assistants)
• Tools
  • GraphViz (a real life-saver if you draw a lot of Turing machine diagrams or function flow diagrams ... great for a lot of graph-drawing)
    • Arrow Translate (a simple tool for writing function-flow diagrams) *
  • Match (line-filtering utility) *
  • SubCode (flexible preprocessing orchestration) *
  • RLWrap (a super-handy line-editing tool)
  • Unison (file synchronisation)
  • version control
    • GNU Arch (a.k.a. "TLA" ... an alternative version-control software)
    • Darcs (simple, decentralised version-control that claims to be based on physics phenomena)
    • KVS2 (my simple version-control library) *