Adam Shaw

	I am a	Ph.D. Student in Computer Science
	office	Ryerson 257C
	office phone	(773) 702-9110
	cell phone	(773) 952-9924
	email
	current course	none
	dept address	Department of Computer Science The University of Chicago 1100 East 58th Street Chicago, IL 60637

Bored?

Why not learn Malayalam?

Research

I am interested in programming language design. Specifically, I am interested in developing languages that encourage clear, concise, generic, efficient, robust code.

I am currently working on a new programming language called Manticore, a language for writing programs for low-cost parallel computers. I am working on the external language as well as its implementation, and I hope for the language to be as elegance-prone as possible. The Manticore project's web page is here.

I had previously been involved in a research project with John Reppy and Derek Dreyer exploring the design of languages that include both ML-style modules and Haskell-style type classes. Part of my work has been to translate Xavier Leroy's modular module system into SML; the translation is publicly available.

Teaching

I love teaching, and I arrived at graduate school through my interest in it.

Before enrolling here in September 2004, I taught for five happy years in high school, middle school, and elementary school. I taught for two years at The Dwight-Englewood School in Englewood, New Jersey, and three years prior to that at The Country School in Madison, Connecticut. I taught computer science and more nebulous "computer" courses for the most part, which I crammed with as much programming as possible. It was also my privilege to teach some math and music courses as well. Here's a chronology of my teaching activities at the University of Chicago:

• past:

  Fall 2004	Lab Instructor	CS 105	Scheme/HtDP
  Winter 2005	Lab Instructor	CS 106	C++
  Summer 2005	Lecturer	CS 102	Java/JSP/SQL
  Fall 2005	Lab Instructor	CS 105	Scheme/HtDP
  Winter 2006	Lab Instructor	CS 106	C++
  Spring 2006	Lecturer	CS 102	Java/JSP/SQL
  Summer 2006	Lecturer	CS 151	Scheme/HtDP
  Winter 2007	TA	CS 22610	Compilers 1
  Spring 2007	Lecturer	CS 102	Java/JSP/SQL
  Summer 2007	Lecturer	CS 151	Scheme/HtDP
  Fall 2007	Lab Instructor	CS 105	Scheme/HtDP
  Spring 2008	Lecturer	CS 102	Java/JSP/SQL

• present:

  Summer 2008

  Lecturer

  CS 151

  Scheme/HtDP

• future:

  Winter 2009

  TA

  CS 22610

  Compilers 1

Links/Personal

Like bad news? Then you'll love the Chicago weather forecast!

Some interesting and/or amusing websites you might care to know about: Jazz Showcase, The Village Vanguard, jazz discography, imdb, rcdb, chowhound, Yahoo crosswords, amazing picture of Zion national park, met, calculus, calculus, not2.

Great websites you already know about: The New York Times, Google, Wikipedia.

I love jazz and I play jazz piano. If jazz were a soup, I would fill my bathtub with it and climb in. Some of my favorite jazz musicians are Chick Corea, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Roy Haynes, Bill Stewart and Jim Oblon. (If you've never heard Jim Oblon play the drums, you might want to buy this record.) Here are some of my favorite recordings.

I love downhill skiing but I rarely get the chance to do it. As such I favor a national deflattening initiative to perturb the surface of the midwestern United States.

The last time I went skiing (outside Wisconsin, on which I refrain from comment) was in Utah in February 2006. [n.b. This statement is no longer true. I went to Wyoming in March '08. It was so good I nearly exploded.] The scenery was so damn pretty you would cry if you saw it, despite your best intentions to maintain a brave, tearless face. Judge for yourself:

Fractal Homer

I wrote a program to do that, y'know. Fractal Homers don't grow on trees.