Background: Early in my PhD, I designed a table-based programming language and runtime system to design, debug, and deploy scientific surveys on the web. With my project adivsor, I collaborated with folks from the Linguistics department. I first presented SurveyMan at the 2014 Off the Beaten Track workshop. This work won first place at the 2014 PLDI Student Research Competition, a best paper award at OOPSLA 2014, and a 2015 Outstanding Synthesis Award at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. UVM PhD student Michael McConnell resurrected this work with an interest in applying quantitative information flow to surveys to protect potentially vulnerable populations.
Current work: As a result of serendipitous opportunitites afforded by my UVM colleagues Joe Near, I returned to this work due to the confluence of student interest in privacy, natural language processing, and biased data collection. Furthermore, the release of tools that leverage large langauge models have made some of the more labor-intenstive aspects of this work potentially much lighter. If you would like to discuss further, please reach out and/or schedulea meeting with me.