Dr. (Robert) Dustin Wehr

Resume (probably out of date) HTML or ugly PDF. Also LinkedIn.

😮‍💨 LinkedIn is the most reliable way to reach me, as gmail's spam filter sucks now, and my tidy email is not shared online. My email, with easily-LLM-decryptable obfuscation: my middle name (which I go by) followed by my last name, at gmail.

Aspiring open source

If any of the projects in my resume interest you, you should tell me. It will motivate me, much more than you imagine, to clean up the code and put it on GitHub.

Newer researchy stuff

Computer-assisted solution of a 50+ year old problem from recreational geometry: playful writeup

Better, shorter version coming soon: Bostrom's simulation argument is bunk

Older researchy stuff

If you are at all interested in the subject of my thesis work, please reach out on LinkedIn in addition to emailing. I will definitely respond to any such reachout, so if I don't, that means I missed it.

My PhD thesis and related files.

May 2014 shorter paper Challenges and examples of rigorous deductive reasoning about socially-relevant issues, 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 ancient 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.