Posts

Dec 16, 2022 Mid-Point Review Materials
This page holds my “year 3 review” materials for evaluation and promotion at Syracuse University. My detailed personal statement (including teaching and research statements) is here My current CV is linked here A (~22MB) zip file linked here gives the full review packet, including CV, papers, and my personal statement....
Aug 14, 2022 Certifying Interpreters in Racket dependent-types, functional-programming, theorem-proving
When I began programming, I read a copy of Richard Steven’s “Programming in the UNIX Environment.” Ultimately, my early experimentations with C were a failure; however, I later read David Beazley’s “Python: Essential Reference,” and was quickly able to pick up the UNIX API via it’s much simpler (admittedly, largely...
Apr 10, 2019 Why I hope you'll submit to Scheme Workshop research functional-programming scheme
Link to this year’s Scheme Workshop CFP This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming. The Scheme Workshop represents a diverse community of hackers, academics, and enthusiasts. The workshop offers a forum to share insights, experience, and technical developments of and within the Scheme...
Jan 2, 2018 Why Does Netflix See my Facebook Picture? privacy research
The other day I updated my Facebook profile picture. The thing I didn’t realize was that when I changed it, Netflix also got it: This is pretty jarring. Where was the “share this with Netflix” button that I pressed? Of course, the answer is that it’s right here: It’s buried...
Nov 10, 2017 Video: Exploiting Use After Free (UAF) vulnerabilities security videos memory-safety use-after-free
Obligatory: I must point out that my inspiration for this post was a really nice video on YouTube. I don’t claim to have invented this idea, I just wanted to explain it in a way that makes sense to me (although the YouTuber likely does a better job than I)....
Nov 9, 2017 Job materials for 2017 git talks
I’m applying to colleges and universities again in 2017. I’m very happy at Haverford, but I’m on the lookout for a tenure-track spot at a place that has students and colleagues that will excite me in the same way I’m feeling right now: My research statement (4 12-point pages) My...
Nov 9, 2017 All About Git git talks
I’m giving a college-wide talk for FIG (Fig is Good) tonight. FIG is a student computing group. I’m hoping to record the talk, but for now I’ll just put the slides here.
Sep 23, 2017 My new cybersecurity course at Haverford (Spring 2017) teaching
You can also download this syllabus as a PDF. Computer Security: Attacks and Defenses (CMSC 323 at Haverford) Prerequisites: Experience in C programming: E.g., CMSC245 at Haverford or CMSC246 at Bryn Mawr Experience with or willingness to learn learn new languages (Python, SQL, JavaScript, etc..) Workload: 3 lecture hours per...
Sep 22, 2017 Writing tip: say the text back to you writing
Here’s the tip: have your computer read your writing back to you. Listen to how it sounds. Then, iterate until it conveys what you’d like to hear. On a mac, you can do this it like this: say -r words_per_minute "My speech goes here" I do this to either: Read...
Sep 1, 2017 How to Succeed in Grad School talks grad-school
I gave this talk on August 24, 2017, to incoming grad students at the University of Maryland, College Park. Full slides available here
Oct 23, 2016 Here: Have Some PLUM Scrum research
This post is about transparency with your advisor. It seems like most problems that PhD students face boil down to communication and transparency: students work on something the advisor doesn’t expect, the advisor has different expectations for number of papers required to graduate, student collaborates with someone when the advisor...
Oct 15, 2016 Appreciating Research as Problems research
Recently I reflected on the kinds of problems I’ve worked on during my PhD, and in doing so realized that I likely did not fully appreciate what research was until rather recently. Research is about identifying and solving novel, important, and generalizable problems inherent in nature. Looking back on the...
Sep 11, 2016 The nonobvious -- but important -- aspects of teaching (for me) teaching
I recently got motivated to look up teaching reviews for members of our department (and myself) on various websites our students frequent. Something occurred to me that I had previously suspected but hadn’t clearly articulated in my head: the parts of teaching that I enjoyed most weren’t necessarily the most...
May 11, 2016 Program Visualization as Abstract Interpretation
For this past semester, I’ve been thinking in a semi-principaled way about how we should visualize program executions. For example, how should we visualize this program: let id x = x in let g x = id x let check_zero y = if y = 0 then bad () else...
Mar 10, 2016 Half-Baked Ideas on The Future of Static Analysis and Security security
It is well known that security policies for programs (such as noninterference) are not properties of a single run, but rather of properties about sets of runs. For example, the following program uses a so-called implicit flow to exfiltrate the value of its secret input: input(secret) if (secret == 0)...
Mar 6, 2016 The Environment Problem and Abstract Counting
Over the weekend I attempted to read a paper by Matt Might called Logic Flow Analysis. Logic Flow Analysis promises to marry constraint solvers and abstract interpretation so that they play off each other to produce better analysis results. Unfortunately, I fell somewhat flat on this, as the amount of...
Sep 22, 2012 Efficient SAT Solving algorithms sat
The Boolean satisfiability problem is simply stated: Given a set of propositional formulas, decide whether or not there is an assignment to the variables in the formula such that the formula is satisfied (true). This basically says: given a large set of constraints with AND and ORs, can you find...
Sep 4, 2012 On Understanding Coinduction coinduction functional-programming
Here’s the basic story: Induction is about finite data, co-induction is about infinite data. The typical example of infinite data is the type of a lazy list (a stream). For example, lets say that we have the following object in memory: let (pi : int list) = (* some function...