Rijul Jain

I’m an undergraduate at Williams College majoring in Computer Science and English. I’ll be a visiting student at the University of Oxford for the 2023-24 academic year. My background is in: programming language design and implementation; text-to-visual computation; Linux and its labyrinthine workings; probing the possibilities of literary criticism and theory going forward; aesthetically innovative representations of history in literature; and English literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Recently, I’ve explored the intersection of programming languages and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUSE) program under Joshua Sunshine and Keenan Crane, researching domain-specific program generation with large language models to democratize diagram authoring using Penrose. As part of previous research with Daniel Barowy at Williams, I’ve also implemented a programming language that describes and captures UNIX filesystem state, sidestepping problems with breaking system call API changes to safely express program semantics for OS platform- and version-agnostic execution.

I’m also deeply invested in finding generative ways to reconcile the richness of the logics and interpretive modes of aesthetically daring literature, literary theory and unconventional philosophy (?) with our various computational models of (and subsequent assumptions about) the world. I hope to work with programming languages in an arts- and therefore ultimately human-centered fashion, specifically informed by as well as reshaping such insights from the humanities.

github