About Richard
Richard Townsend is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. He specializes in Programming Languages and Compilers (which is reflected in his teaching), but he also enjoys teaching Intro CS and Computer Organization courses. Richard is the Founding Director of the Emerging Scholars Program in the Computer Science Dept. at Tufts University.
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While earning his PhD at Columbia University, his research focused on the use of functional languages and high-level optimizations to translate recursive algorithms with irregular memory access patterns into efficient hardware designs. This work revolved around his research group's project: an optimizing Haskell-to-SystemVerilog compiler.
Contact
Education
Research Interests
Functional Languages
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Modeling specialized hardware with Haskell
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Exploring semantic connections between functional languages and hardware specifications
2013 - 2019
Columbia University
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Compilers
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Program optimization via semantics-preserving transformations
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Transformations to bridge the gap from pure functional languages to logical circuits
2013 - 2015
Columbia University
M.S. in Computer Science
2009 - 2013
Oberlin College
B.A. in Computer Science