Résumé

(As of August 2016.)

Education

• PhD in Computer Science
  University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
  Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
  2012–present
  Advisor: Neelakantan Krishnaswami
• BS in Computer Science
  Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
  2008–2012
  QPA: 3.46 out of 4

Areas of expertise

• Systems programming: I've worked on database engines, JIT (and ahead-of-time) compilers, operating system kernels, and garbage collectors.

• Programming languages are my research area and hobby. If you're designing or implementing a programming language, I can help.

• I know many languages and I learn new ones quickly. I'm fluent in C, C++, Python, Haskell, Racket (or Scheme), and SML; capable with Javascript, Clojure, Rust, x86(-64) assembly, OCaml, Common Lisp, Prolog, Java, Agda, and Twelf.

Experience

• University of Birmingham, UK, 2016–present
  PhD student

  Currently working on Datafun, a functional query language inspired by Datalog. The key ideas are: 1. set comprehensions are more general than relational algebra; 2. enforcing monotonicity with types lets us write declarative recursive queries.

• Recurse Center, Summer 2014
  Batchling

  At Recurse Center I created Moxy, a syntactically extensible language. The key idea is that monoids structure extensibility. I presented at IFL 2014 about Moxy and the theory behind it. This blog post provides some background.

• Carnegie Mellon University, 2011–2014
  PhD student and undergraduate researcher

  • Worked with Frank Pfenning and Limin Jia to extend blame semantics to concurrent systems. Blame semantics allow determining what part of a program is at fault for a runtime contract violation.

  • Worked with Umut Acar on a novel garbage collection algorithm designed to exploit the spatial locality inherent in fork-join parallelism.

  • Undergraduate senior thesis on a type theory and formal semantics for libraries and linking, with a proof-of-concept implementation. Advised by Karl Crary.

• RethinkDB, Summer 2011 and 2012
  Software Engineering Intern

  • Integrated javascript evaluation into query executor.

  • Helped design and implement a novel query language incorporating ideas from functional programming such as streams and map/reduce.

  • Improved buffer cache performance by allowing garbage collection to be concurrent with write operations.

  • Wrote and debugged high-performance, high-concurrency C++ code.

• Carnegie Mellon University, Spring & Fall 2011, Spring 2012
  Teaching Assistant for 15-150 "Functional Programming"

  • TA during the course's first-ever semester.

  • Implemented course infrastructure, including autograder and parallel sequence library.

  • Co-authored homeworks and labs with professor and other TAs.

• Google, Summer 2010
  Software Engineer in Test Intern

  • Developed a tool to visualize changes in Google Web Toolkit compilation results due to changes in source code.

Relevant course work

• 15-410: Operating System Design & Implementation (A)

  Designed & implemented various system-level projects, most notably a threading library and a multitasking, preemptible kernel.

• 15-411: Compiler Design & Implementation (B)

  Worked with a partner to design & implement a compiler, written in Haskell, for a safe C-like language, targeting both x86-64 assembly and LLVM.

• 15-814: Types and Programming Languages (A)

  Formal study of programming language design from a type-theoretic standpoint. Covers λ-calculi, concurrency, free and scoped references, module systems and higher kinds, etc.

• 15-417: Higher-order Typed Compilation (B)

  Wrote a multi-stage type-directed compiler and runtime for a high-level strongly-typed functional source language (subset of SML), targeting C.