I’m a computer science researcher at
Balena based out of Englewood, New Jersey.
About Me

I have been interested in computer science since
I was six years old, and have built up an unmatched passion for the
field. I have extensive experience in software development and research
from internships, projects, and competitions. I graduated from the
Georgia Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in Computer
Science with a focus in system architecture and theory and a Masters of
Science in Computer Science with a specialization in Machine learning. I
am currently working as a Backend Engineer at Balena.
Work Experience
Balena
Backend
Engineer • Feb 2021 - Present
- Develop
backend code for the Balena ecosystem
- More details
to come…
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Research
Scientist • Jun 2019 - Feb 2021
- Lead
contributor to research projects sponsored by large entities DARPA, NIH,
DOD, and ONR
- Wrote and
published peer reviewed conference and journal papers to communicate
research findings to the greater research community
- Contributed
and participated in white paper and proposal writing to bring in more
funding for new and on-going projects
- Delivered
applied research projects to sponsors such as source code, web
applications, and technical reports
Undergraduate
Research Assistant • Jan 2016 - May 2019
- Lead
contributor to research projects sponsored by large entities NIH and
ONR
- Wrote and
published a peer reviewed journal paper to communicate research findings
to the greater research community
- Delivered
applied research projects to sponsors such as source code, web
applications, and technical reports
- Predicting
crimes in Portland, OR using temporal and geographic features derived
from crime statistics and GIS data
The Boeing Company
Software
Development Intern • May 2016 - Aug 2017
- Developed a
security auditing tool suite for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to maintain
hardened security on classified servers
- Developed a
web application in C#, HTML, and JavaScript to view and analyze network
traffic
- Developed
several system administration scripts as needed by team members to
complete tasks such as emailing system logs and automatic server
backups
- Organized
and led a software development team to create a minimum viable product
of a Kanban board web application
- Pitched the
Kanban board prototype to management to form a team to continue
development of the application after I left
- Documented
and executed an upgrade plan for the company’s identity management
servers
- Developed an
Outlook-integrated conference room mapping tool in C#
Projects
AlgebraicJulia
- A GitHub
Organization for a collection of Julia packages for defining modeling
frameworks as generalized algebraic theories
- Includes
Julia packages such as Catlab.jl, AlgebraicPetri.jl, and
AlgebraicRelations.jl
- A category
theory approach to defining metamodeling tasks for representing,
composing, selecting, and tuning scientific models
- Research
funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
Petri.jl
- A stochastic
petri net modeling framework for the Julia programming language
- Allow petri
nets to be compiled to Gillespie and differential equation based
simulations
VirtualEnv.jl
- Self-contained
virtual environments for the Julia programming language
- A
reimplementation of
venv
from Python in Julia
Corsair Database
- Research
funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR)
- Developed a
web application for viewing and analyzing sonar SAS data using Go,
Python, and PostgresDB deployed with Docker and Drone.io
- Engineered a
database for managing scientific experiments to utilize the speed and
efficiency of using a rigid relational database, while being flexible
enough to handle the changing data requirements of scientific
experimentation
Research
Funding
Dates |
Role |
Sponsor |
Title |
Amount |
2020 - 2021 |
Task Lead |
DARPA |
Computable Models - Generalized
Algebraic Theories for Enhancing Multiphysics |
≈$1.35M |
2018 - 2021 |
Task Lead |
DARPA |
Artifical Intelligence Exploration -
Automating Scientific Knowledge Extraction |
≈$1M |
2019 - 2021 |
Performer |
Office of Naval Research |
Extracting, Explaining, and Estimating
Information in Sonar Data |
≈$400K |
2019 - 2021 |
Performer |
Office of Naval Research |
MCM Situational Awarness |
≈$375K |
2018 - 2019 |
Performer |
Air Force |
Network Risk Indication |
≈$135K |
2016 - 2019 |
Performer |
Office of Naval Research |
Performance Estimation of Underwater MCM
Operations |
≈$990K |
2015 - 2019 |
Performer |
Office of Naval Research |
Automation for UxV-based Mine
Countermeasures |
$540K |
Peer Reviewed Journal Publications
- An
algebraic framework for structured epidemic modelling, Sophie
Libkind, Andrew Baas, Micah Halter, Evan Patterson
James P. Fairbanks, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A
(Volume 380, Issue 2233),
2022
Open
Access
Peer Reviewed Conference Publications
- Typed and
Stratified Models with Slice Categories, Sophie Libkind, Andrew
Baas, Micah Halter, Evan Patterson James P.
Fairbanks, Applied Category Theory,
2022
PDF Video Slides
- Compositional
Scientific Computing with Catlab and SemanticModels, Micah
Halter, Evan Patterson, Andrew Baas, James Fairbanks, Applied
Category Theory,
2020
PDF Video
- SemanticModels.jl:
A Julia Package for Scientific Model Augmentation, Micah
Halter, Sreenath Raparti, Kun Cao, Christine Herlihy, James
Fairbanks, JuliaCon,
2019
PDF Slides Video
- A
Compositional Framework for Scientific Model
Augmentation, Micah Halter, Christine Herlihy,
James Fairbanks, Applied Category Theory,
2019
PDF Slides
Under Review Journal Publications
- Accelerating
Automatic Target Recognition Performance Estimation with a Relational
Database for Synthetic Aperture Sonar, James Fairbanks*,
Micah Halter*, Trevor Goodyear, Matthew Jackson, Brian
O’Donnell, John Wilcher, Navy Journal of Underwater Research,
2018
Invited Talks
- Compositional
Epidemiological Modeling Using Structured Cospans,
Micah Halter and Evan
Patterson, University of California Riverside Categories
Seminar, Nov 2020
Slides Video
Posters
- SemanticModels.jl:
A Framework for Automatic Composition of Scientific Models Across
Domains,
Micah Halter, Kun Cao,
James Fairbanks, SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific
Computing, Feb 2020
PDF
- Scientific
Knowledge Extraction, Augmentation & Analysis,
Micah Halter, James
Fairbanks, Eric Davis, Clayton Morrison, Ryan Wright, DARPA Demo
Day, Sep 2019
Open Source Involvement
Arch User Repository Package Maintainer
Education
Georgia Institute of Technology
Master of Science in Computer
Science • Jan 2020 - May 2022
- 4.0 GPA
- Specialization
in Machine Learning
Georgia Institute of Technology
Bachelor of Science in Computer
Science • Aug 2015 - May 2019
- Concentration
in system architecture and theory
- Dean’s List
Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Fall 2018, Spring 2019
Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology
Bachelor of Science in Computer
Science • Aug 2017 - Dec 2017
Skills
- Full Stack
Development
- Deep Learning
- System
Administration
- Database Design and
Management
- High Performance
Computing
- Machine
Learning
- Functional
Programming
- Category Theory
- Languages
- C/C++
- Julia
- Python
- Go
- Java
- Haskell
- Scala
- Perl
- Bash
- SQL
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- LaTeX
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript