I am a first second year graduate student at Berkeley studying
programming systems. Of the group,
I have been working primarily with Ras Bodik, with a secondary project with Raluca Sauciuc.
Previously, I was a member of
Brown PLT, particpating in several language design,
verification, and security projects there under Shriram Krishnamurthi.
I'm interested in web code, spanning from creatively designed interactive systems to traditional business applications to the developing mobile environment. My motivations are largely from time as an independent design and development contractor, pre-bubble startup, independent commercial radio station do-it-all, and then developer at Macromedia. I would like to think my time at Brown, Berkeley, and Adobe's Advanced Technology Lab has not entirely been spent on academic concerns.
I always find it interesting to know what languages language designers actually use. Over the past year, I rather equivalently wrote in JavaScript 1.5, ActionScript 3, Bash + sed, OCaml, R, Python, and Java 1.5. The ActionScript and JavaScript projects often included snippets in the functional reactive style. Contrast this against what I don't use. Even considering my time in commerical development, the only times I used C or C++ were to interface to existing code bases, complete Operating Systems projects, or whatever misguided things one does while in high school. I found lazy languages (Haskell), logic and specification languages (Prolog, Alloy), data flow languages (Max/MSP, shell), and metaprogramming rich languages (Scheme) formative, and writing Flapjax made me often appreciate many of their features that JavaScript did not have (particuarly statically typed parametric polymorphism, delimited continuations, minimalistic syntax, and hygienic macros), but, as implied above, find that I generally only turn to them out of curiosity. If the CLR lost a lot of proprietary restrictions, and otherwise gained the universality of the JVM, I would probably switch from Java to the F#/C# family. Laziness is probably what's keeping me from Scala (of my own, not to imply the language isn't eager...). Ultimately, I believe Iota is the most clean and unambigious language.
Update: As I've been mostly reading this semester, my code writing has been equally distributed between C, MPI for C, SK combinators, untyped lambdas, and, nominally, UPC and OpenMP. To a lesser extent, I converted some Flapjax examples to FIRE, my reactivity extension for ECMAScript 3.5 (including side effects).
Update 2: The semester is drawing to a close, and now I am writing in a mix of ANTLR 3, Python, Java, Bash, and JavaScript. This will likely be mixed in with MPI over either C or O'CAML. Inbetween the updates, I wrote way too much LaTeX.
I was the teaching assistant for CS164, the undergrad compilers course at Berkeley. Overall class ratings were on teaching effectiveness and worth of the course; Prof. Bodik and I broke course records in both leading back 15 years. Making a topic many consider dead seem more worthwhile than the average CS course is pretty snazzy, so I thank the internets.
At Brown, I was the head teaching assistant for intro. to models of computation (cs51) and intro. programming languages (cs173), was a regular TA for discrete math (cs22), and wrote lectures and projects for the new systems security course (cs166).
Berkeley: Statistical Learning Theory, Current Berkeley Research in Programming Systems, Design and Analysis of Programming Languages, Applications of Parallel Computers.
Brown: Programming Language Semantics, Access Control Models, Statistical Natural Language Processing, Verification of Dynamic Access Control Policies.
My undergraduate coursework was mostly in computer science, math, and neuro+cogsci, in that order of likeliness.