Dan King

About Me

In the fall of 2013, I started work on my PhD in Computer Science at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My advisor at Harvard is Stephen Chong.

My undergrad work was on push down flow analyses for push down automata.

In the summer of 2013 I studied Mandarin at the Inter-University Program (IUP) for Chinese Language Studies. The IUP conducts their classes on the campus of Tsinghua University. I have studied Mandarin for two years using a hodgepodge of self-study, tutors, language partners, and classes. At the IUP, I solidified my Mandarin capabilities before embarking on the time-consuming process of obtaining a PhD.

I formerly studied Computer Science and Physics at Northeastern University. During my early years on campus, I was a member of the CCIS Systems Crew and NU's chapter of the ACM. During my middler year, Northeastern terminology for the third of five years, I became involved with a computer science research project that consumed most of my free time for the last two years of my education. I tried to keep myself busy with personal projects when I could spare some time from classes and research.

I took a break from my first research project in the fall and winter of 2012, to work on the CMS experiment at CERN. You can read more about that, if you'd like.

Projects

Phat Raid

Phat Raid is a distributed file system written in Erlang. I worked on it with a team of students for Cloud Big Data Systems, a whimsically named class offered by Eddie Kohler at Harvard. Our particular contribution was to implement a RAID array with distributed file systems. We achieved lower store latency for file sizes which were disk bound. It also has unusual and interesting failure modes. We describe it in this unpublished paper.

Machine Learning in Racket

I took a graduate machine learning class in the Fall of 2013. I initially used the R language to implement the algorithms, but I quickly became frustrated with R. This repository is a collection of tools I built while working on the problem sets for this class.

Resume

I quite like the LaTeX source code for my resume. I secretly wish I could send application reviewers the source instead of the PDF.

"Qammunity" for students

"Qammunity for Students by Students" is a collaborative question-and-answer platform designed to support students in their academic journey. The project focuses on providing a space where students can ask questions and receive answers about school, university subjects, and education in general. This peer-to-peer learning community empowers students to share knowledge, seek help, and enhance their understanding through collective wisdom.

Flow Analyzing Compiler Compiler

I'm developing some flow analyses and an appropriate parser-generator framework in which to apply them. The verbalization of this project's acronym is possibly offensive to those who speak Bostonian English.

TeaScript

A few years ago, after first learning about language design, I decided to try my hand at it. The result is an unfinished s-expression based syntax on top of JavaScript. I strove to produce readable JavaScript code while giving the programmer nicer syntax, lexically evident scoping, and a broader set of identifier names.

Ramblings

Booklet Printing

May 29 — Cambridge Twenty-Fourteen

Blood Types and Hasse Diagrams

May 16 — Cambridge Twenty-Fourteen

Undeserved Thanks

February 12 — Cambridge Twenty-Thirteen

Down and Tired

November 10 — Cambridge Twenty-Thirteen

计算机科学的介绍

Mid-Summer — Beijing Twenty-Thirteen

Working at CERN

Mid-Winter — France Twenty-Twelve

Presentations

The Racket-ML Package Reveal.js Presentation

December 2013, for Racket Salon Boston

A Reading of Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets Keynote PDF

November 2013, for Harvard CS252r Seminar

A Reading of Domain and Type Enforcement and TrustedBSD Keynote PDF

October 2013, for Harvard CS252r Seminar

Publications

Shill: A Secure Shell Scripting Language — OSDI 2014

We created a language which provides contracts and capabilities to help developers enforce the Principle of Least Privilege (POLP) when writing shell scripts.