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.
I actually have a resume now that's not my linkedin page! Success here I come!
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.
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.
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.