I’m a computer science researcher at the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Atlanta, Georgia.
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 am working as a Researcher at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
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 Conference Publications
- 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 - Dec 2021
- 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