Robert Morrison Seater
Contact Information
Professional Information
Resume as of December 2008: (PDF), (RTF text file)
Research Publications available for
download, along with drafts of my PhD thesis, defense slides, and
job talks.
I am a PhD student at MIT in CSAIL, working in the Software Design Group (SDG)
under the supervision of Daniel Jackson. My work
is largely in Software Engineering, Requirement Engineering, and
Human Computer Interactions. My recent research interests include
applying and expanding the Problem Frames approach, analyzing the
software used by the
Northeast Proton Therapy Center at the Mass. General Hospital
(MGH), and improving the user experience for logical modelers. In
2007, I wrote a longer description of my current research for the
department-wide research abstract collection.
As an undergraduate at Haverford College, I double majored
in Mathematics and Computer Science. In CS, I was advised by David
Wonnacott, who does work in programming languages and
compilers. We worked on efficiently determining integer
satisfiability in the presence of disequalities. In Math, I was
advised by
Curtis Greene, who does work in algebraic combinatorics. We
worked on the decomposition of polygons and polytopes into
Minkowski summands. To a lesser extent, I studied primatology
with the now retired Sid Perloe.
Academic Institutions:
- Graduate (2002-present, PhD, SM) Massachusetts Institute of Technology -
a rigorous technical institute located in Cambridge,
Massachusetts
- Undergraduate (1998-2002, BS): Haverford College - a friendly and
academically strong liberal arts college located in Haverford,
Pennsylvania.
- High School (1994-1998): Ravenscroft School - a solid
college prep school located in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Personal Information
Hobbies:
- Cambridge Games
Factory: a small board game company which specializing in
helping new designers get into the market. I am director of game
development, which involves coordinatinog our 30 external
designers and helping them finalize their games and bring them to
market. The company was founded by Ed
Carter.
- Board Game Geek:
extensive reviews, discussion, and artwork pertaining to tabletop
board games.
- Heroscape customizations,
maps, and armies.
- Legos and Their Clones: an
analysis of their relative quality and compatibility. (I am a
fan and collector of studded building bricks).
- Studs At War is a tabletop wargame
I designed to harness the physicality of Legos -- hit points are
simply the number of pieces remaining in a model and models can
be repaired or healed by reassembling them at your home base.
Sample designs and battles can be viewed at on my SAW
Brickshelf page.
- Space Mines, an Ice House
game I designed for 2 or more players. Ice house is a set of
plastic pyramids produced by Looney Labs which supports a
large number of abstract games.
- The Paper Drop, an event I
designed and ran for the 2005 CSAIL
Olympics.
Images and People:
Resources and Tutorials:
- Piled Higher and
Deeper: how to survive a PhD program.
- WebMonkey is
a good collection of beginner to intermediate web development
tutorials.
- XnView
/ Nconvert is a handy tool for manipulating images from the
command line. I use it to resize my cat pictures.
Web Pages I Wrote or Maintain:
Helping Google find me: Rob Seater, Robert Seater, Robert M
Seater, Robert M. Seater, Robert Morrison Seater, rseater,
RMS, Bob Seater