Dougal Sutherland

I'm a first-year Ph.D. student in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Jeff Schneider on machine learning for groups of data points and its use in understanding the results of big scientific simulations. I'm also interested in ML's interactions with cognitive science and language, and have a vague outsider interest in programming languages.

I was class of '11 at Swarthmore, with an honors Computer Science major, an honors Linguistics minor and a course Mathematics and Statistics minor.

I've also been:

• A Teaching Assistant at SSP, an intense astronomy/physics/math/programming summer program for high school seniors, at Westmont in 2011. I was a student myself in Ojai in 2006.
• Part of a team that build the new RSD website for Swarthmore, along with James Smith and Nick Felt. [source]
• Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Gazette. A few selected articles are linked from my farewell note.
• Main web developer for the DG. The code for our now-defunct Django site is on github.
• A sysadmin for SCCS.
• A DJ at WSRN (fiercely independent radio!).
• An IT Associate at Swarthmore ITS.
• A high school student at Phillips Academy Andover (class of '07).

Some academic work I did at Swarthmore:

• Summer 2010 through June 2011: Extensions of the SMRF relational learning system to account for human cues, among other improvements. This was my project in the REU at Oklahoma University, with Andrew Fagg and Matt Bodenhamer. My honors thesis was based on this work. [pdf]
• Spring 2011: A senior honors study paper on the phonotactics of Chaha. [pdf]
• Fall 2010: An implementation and evaluation of two-dimensional histograms in the PostgreSQL database system, with Ryan Carlson. [pdf]
• Spring 2010: Extending the CBIM developmental architecture to know about temporal relationships, with Zack Ontiveros. [pdf]
• Fall 2009: An AI system for a search-and-rescue simulator, with Ryan Carlson and Andrew Stromme. [pdf]
• Spring 2009: An independent study on a mother-tongue instruction project in Rasuwa, Nepal. [pdf]
• Fall 2008: An implementation of a lexical distributional similarity system, with Brian Tomasik. [pdf]

Some random other stuff:

• My facebook, google+, last.fm, github, and stackoverflow profiles.
• A few scripts and such that I've put on a silly "blog".