My name is Sam Stites – I'm a Ph.D. student at the Northeastern PRL studying Bayesian inference and the semantics of probabilistic programming languages. Prior to starting my Ph.D. program, one of my more successful endeavors has been writing the Haskell bindings to PyTorch, called Hasktorch.
In my research, I study how composing probabilistic languages with different semantic domains can result in flexible probabilistic inference that can overcome any shortcomings found in a language on its own. More broadly, I'm interested in semantics, type theory, and formal verification; I often find myself typing away in an Agda file, against my better judgment.
I've lead a few different lives before I started programming. I've lived in a few different continents, was part of a couple of circus troupes spinning fire and juggling, and I was part of the inaugural cohort of Venture for America where I met ex-presidential candidate Andrew Yang (who I did not vote for).
When I'm not a disheveled mess working on research I'm trying to squeeze in more sleep or parenting.
Contact: The best way to contact me is by email, just apply ROT13 to the
following: [email protected]. I'm also reachable as .stites on discord.
#Projects
I actively work on a rust compiler and formalization that prototypes a multi-language approaches to probabilistic inference.
A small project from my past which I actively maintain is redirect-to-abstract (github). If this piques your interest and you want to use it, feel free to reach out!
Projects I no longer work on, but are still going strong:
- Inference combinators, reborn in coix, is actively developed by my equally-contributing first author Heiko Zimmerman
- Hasktorch is in long-term maintenance mode by Junji Hashimoto
Unmaintained projects:
- reinforce reinforcement learning in Haskell.
- CSSR (v2). Causal State Splitting Reconstruction of recursive hidden Markov models. I coded this up with Cosma Shalizi before starting my Ph.D. studies and it is currently in an unpublished state. If this work is relevant to you, please contact Cosma directly and cc me.
Feel free to reach out if want to talk about stenography, Agda, or parenting in grad school.
#Teaching
-
Spring 2024: CS4400 Introduction to Programming Languages
- Office hours: Thursday 2-3pm (virtual, see canvas for link), 3-4pm (@ WVH 308).
- Fall 2020: CS6220 Data Mining Techniques
#Publications and Talks
#Service
- PLDI 2023 Student Volunteer
- Northeastern 2022 Faculty Admissions Volunteer
- Northeastern 2021 Ph.D. Review Committee Volunteer