appearance (Robert) Dustin Wehr

Hey! What are you doing here? Did you google me? If so, do me a solid and shoot me an email to tell me to update this page please. This page is old, old, old. These days, I am spending a plurality of my time formalizing law at Legalese; it's contract law, not the criminal/constitutional law that'd be closer to the hopelessly-utopian interests I developed during my thesis work, but that's a really good thing! Anyway, please do email me! dustin d0t [my last name] at gmail d0t com.


Recently graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Stephen Cook and Alasdair Urquhart. Did some teaching. Now taking an indefinite permanent leave from academia. Working on various software stuff now, Legalese primarily, with my thesis passion project on the backburner but not forgotten. As an MSc student I worked in Computational Complexity Theory.

To reach me: dustin.[my last name]@gmail.com.

Currently relying on linkedin for my resume...

Main project

Legalese

Backburner

Logic for Progress

Research stuff

My PhD thesis and related files.

Final May 2014 draft of Challenges and examples of rigorous deductive reasoning about socially-relevant issues, to be presented at Trends in Logic XIV. Also Thesis proposal from Feb 2014.

Paper proving the easier of the two main conjectures posed by Anna Gál, Michal Koucký, and Pierre McKenzie in their 2008 paper "Incremental branching programs":
Lower bound for deterministic semantic-incremental branching programs solving GEN
The harder problem, proving superpolynomial lower bounds for nondeterministic semantic-incremental branching programs, is still open.

Publications

The first publication listed below is a journal paper that contains all the results from the two conference papers that follow it in the list.

  • Pebbles and Branching Programs for the Tree Evaluation Problem. ACM Transactions on Computation Theory 2012. Stephen Cook, Pierre McKenzie, Dustin Wehr, Mark Braverman, Rahul Santhanam. Pebbles and Branching Programs for the Tree Evaluation Problem. (accepted)

  • Branching Programs for Tree Evaluation. MFCS 2009: 175-186, Mark Braverman, Stephen A. Cook, Pierre McKenzie, Rahul Santhanam, Dustin Wehr

  • Fractional Pebbling and Thrifty Branching Programs, FSTTCS 2009, Mark Braverman, Stephen Cook, Pierre McKenzie, Rahul Santhanam, Dustin Wehr

    The main results of my masters paper (arXiv) are the (tight) fractional pebbling lower bound (also in above FSTTCS and ACM publications) and the (tight) lower bound for deterministic thrifty branching programs solving the DAG evaluation problem (also in the ACM publication). It also contains some extensions of results from the above publications, including a generalization of the definition of thrifty branching program that greatly expands the number of input variables that a program may query.

    Here is a writeup of an unpublished result that we mentioned in the ACM journal paper:
    Exact size of smallest minimum-depth deterministic BPs solving the tree evaluation problem

    Some school projects

    Using Restricted Boltzmann Machines for recommendations (i.e. collaborative filtering): a description and some small improvements on the influential work of R Salakhutdinov, A Mnih, G Hinton (one of the key algorithms used by the winners of the Netflix Prize). This is a report on a course project with my friend Wesley George for Geoff Hinton's graduate course Introduction to Machine Learning.

    A detailed statement and proof of Büchi's Theorem, which gives a relationship between Monadic Second Order Logic and finite automata on infinite words. This is a report I did during my undergrad for Prakash Panangaden's graduate course Formal Verification.

    Hobby stuff

    Firefox extension mingaling.

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