May 15, 2022
May 15, 2022
February 20, 2024
I’m currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Middlebury College in Vermont. I have been teaching courses on programming and languages and compilers as well as introductory computer science. Previously I have been a Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science at Harvard University where I worked on the legal applications and implications of computational technologies.
Before that, I completed the PhD program at the Computer Science Department at Cornell University working under Nate Foster. Even earlier, I graduated Magna Cum Laude from Lafayette College in 2011 with degrees in Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. I’m originally from Calcutta, India where I went to school at St. Xavier’s Collegiate School.
Previously I’ve worked at:
- Fujitsu Labs of America in their Network Systems Research group
- GrammaTech, Inc. on their static analysis tools
- Virginia Tech as part of the Prolangs research group
Interests & Projects
My interests are centered around languages—human, computational, legal and visual. I’m interested in the way we use them to communicate and build structures of knowledge and information. Specifically, I am currently involved in the following areas:
- The potential of programming languages and associated tools to enforce legal restrictions on software. My main project in this area has been a computational model and implementation of conveyances in property law.
- Notational programming, a novel methodology for incorporating handwritten inputs into programming languages, mostly developed in collaboration with Ian Arawjo.
- Online publication systems for websites and distributed social media. The World Wide Web offers a great opportunity for human discourse and collaboration and an important part of that is usable web publishing systems.
Outside of computational interests, I have been meditating and studying Zen Buddhism for a number of years now. I am curious about the potential of tools like therapy, medication, meditation and philosophy to provide a coherent and practical framework for human wellness and flourishing.
I also have a fondness for analog tools and instruments, especially for writing and communication. Currently this involves being a user of customizable mechanical keyboards, fountain pens, inks and fancy paper stationery.
Contact
Please send email to shr(AT)basus.me this is the best way to get in touch with
me. I am usually available as basus or basus.me on the various social media
platforms.
Colophon
This is version 3 of this website. It was built from Markdown source files using the Hugo static site generator, along with a smattering of HTML when necessary. Some pages were converted from equivalent LaTeX files. The design of the site is defined using a decent chunk of CSS. Previous iterations of the site were hand-written HTML or built using Pollen.
This website is hosted on an Arch Linux VPS by the Linode hosting service. Pages are (mostly) static HTML5 and CSS and served by the Nginx web server. The fonts used are from the Merriweather family, serif for most body text and sans for headings. For design and layout influences, see my website references.
Almost all text was authored in the Emacs text editor on on a 14-inch 2022 MacBook Pro running a probaly slightly outdated version of macOS.