Research | Selected Publications | Upcoming Talks | Recent Talks | Interviews | Teaching

Research Interests

• Relational programming, program synthesis, and artificial intelligence
• Computational tools for precision medicine
• Functional programming

Selected Publications

Books

Daniel P. Friedman, William E. Byrd, Oleg Kiselyov, and Jason Hemann
The Reasoned Schemer, Second Edition.
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018.
[Source code from the second edition (GitHub)]

Daniel P. Friedman, William E. Byrd and Oleg Kiselyov
The Reasoned Schemer.
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005.
[Complete source code from the first edition--R5RS Scheme (GitHub)]

Theses

William E. Byrd
Relational Programming in miniKanren: Techniques, Applications, and Implementations.
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN,
September 30, 2009.
[Full Dissertation (PDF file)]
[Easier to read, single-spaced, re-typeset version (PDF file), released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.]

Refereed papers

William E. Byrd, Daniel P. Friedman, Ramana Kumar, and Joseph P. Near.
A Shallow Scheme Embedding of Bottom-Avoiding Streams.
To appear in a special issue of Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, in honor of Mitchell Wand's 60th birthday.
[Preprint (PDF file)]

Lisa Zhang, Gregory Rosenblatt, Ethan Fetaya, Renjie Liao, William E. Byrd, Matthew Might, Raquel Urtasun, Richard Zemel.
Neural Guided Constraint Logic Programming for Program Synthesis.
In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 (NeurIPS 2018), 2018.
[Paper and poster]
[Full proceedings]

William E. Byrd, Michael Ballantyne, Greg Rosenblatt, Matthew Might.
Functional Pearl: A Unified Approach to Solving Seven Programming Problems.
In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2017), Oxford, 2017.
[Paper (ACM Digital Library, Open Access)]
[Talk]
[Reusable Artifact]
[Interactive version of paper, courtesy of Nada Amin]

Christina M. Woo, Alejandra Felix, William E. Byrd, Devon K. Zuegel, Mayumi Ishihara, Parastoo Azadi, Anthony T. Iavarone, Sharon J. Pitteri, and Carolyn R. Bertozzi.
Development of IsoTaG, a Chemical Glycoproteomics Technique for Profiling Intact N- and O-Glycopeptides from Whole Cell Proteomes.
Journal of Proteome Research, 2017, 16(4), pp 1706--1718.
Paper (ACS Publications)

Jason Hemann, Dan Friedman, William E. Byrd, Matt Might.
A Small Embedding of Logic Programming with a Simple Complete Search.
In Proceedings of the Dynamic Languages Symposium 2016 (DLS '16), Amsterdam, 2016.
[Paper (ACM Digital Library)]

Dakota Fisher, Matthew Hammer, William E. Byrd, Matthew Might.
miniAdapton: A Minimal Implementation of Incremental Computation in Scheme.
In Proceedings of the 2016 Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming, Nara, Japan, 2016.
[Full paper (PDF file)]
[Complete source code--R6RS Scheme (GitHub)]

Steven Lyde, William E. Byrd, Matthew Might.
Control-Flow of Dynamic Languages via Pointer Analysis.
In the 11th Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) at SPLASH 2015, October 27th, 2015.

William E. Byrd, Eric Holk, and Daniel P. Friedman.
miniKanren, Live and Untagged: Quine Generation via Relational Interpreters (Programming Pearl).
In the Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2012.
[Full paper (PDF file)]
[Complete source code--R6RS Scheme (GitHub)]

Claire E. Alvis, Jeremiah J. Willcock, Kyle M. Carter, William E. Byrd, and Daniel P. Friedman.
cKanren: miniKanren with Constraints.
In Proceedings of the 2011 Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming (Scheme '11), Portland, OR, 2011.
[Full paper (PDF file)]
[Complete source code--R6RS Scheme (GitHub)]

Eric Holk, William E. Byrd, Nilesh Mahajan, Jeremiah Willcock, Arun Chauhan, and Andrew Lumsdaine.
Declarative Parallel Programming for GPUs.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Computing (ParCo), Ghent, Belgium, 2011.
[Complete source code--R6RS Scheme (GitHub)]
[Full paper (PDF file)]

Eric Holk, William E. Byrd, Jeremiah Willcock, Torsten Hoefler, Arun Chauhan, and Andrew Lumsdaine.
Kanor: A Declarative Language for Explicit Communication.
In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Symposium on the Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL),
Austin, TX, pp. 190-204, 2011.
[Full paper (PDF file)]

Andrew W. Keep, Michael D. Adams, Lindsey Kuper, William E. Byrd, and Daniel P. Friedman.
A Pattern-matcher for miniKanren -or- How to Get into Trouble with CPS Macros
In Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming,
Cal Poly Technical Report CPSLO-CSC-09-03, pp. 37-45, 2009.
[Full proceedings (PDF file)]

Joseph P. Near, William E. Byrd and Daniel P. Friedman.
alphaleanTAP: A Declarative Theorem Prover for First-Order Classical Logic
In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2008),
LNCS vol. 5366, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, pp. 238-252, 2008.
[Full paper (PDF file)]
[Complete source code--R6RS Scheme and Prolog (.zip file)]

Oleg Kiselyov, William E. Byrd, Daniel P. Friedman and Chung-chieh Shan
Pure, declarative, and constructive arithmetic relations (declarative pearl)
In Proceedings of the 9th international symposium on functional and logic programming,
ed. Jacques Garrigue and Manuel Hermenegildo, pp. 64-80.
LNCS vol. 4989, Springer, 2008.
[Full paper (PDF file)]

William E. Byrd and Daniel P. Friedman
alphaKanren: A Fresh Name in Nominal Logic Programming
Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming,
Universite Laval Technical Report DIUL-RT-0701, pp. 79-90.
[Full paper (PDF file)]
[Author's revised version (recommended) (PDF file)]
[Revised R5RS-compliant source code (.scm file)]

William E. Byrd and Daniel P. Friedman
From Variadic Functions to Variadic Relations: A miniKanren Perspective.
Proceedings of the 2006 Scheme and Functional Programming Workshop,
University of Chicago Technical Report TR-2006-06, 2006, pp. 105-117.
[Full paper (PDF file)]

Upcoming Talks

Recent Talks, Tutorials, and Summer Schools

Lessons from Building an Interactive Biomedical Reasoning System (hosted by Kanae Tsushima)
National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan, December 18, 2018.

Hygienic Scheme Macros & miniKanren (hosted by Yasuaki Kudo)
Tokyo Haskell Meetup, Tokyo, Japan, December 17, 2018.

CLP(SMT) (talk written with Nada Amin, based on joint work)
Domain Specific Language Design & Implementation (DSLDI 2018), Boston, MA, November 6, 2018.
Part of the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH 2018).

Recent Research on miniKanren (hosted by Dmitri Boulytchev)
Boulytchev Lab, St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia, October 15, 2018.

The Next 100,000 Notions of 'Variable'
Leetspeak 2018, Malmö, Sweden, October 13, 2018.

Relational Programming in miniKanren: an Interactive Tutorial (arranged by Haochen Xie and Sicss Society; hosted by Atsushi Igarashi)
Kyoto, Japan, May 15--16, 2018.
Taught a two-day interactive mini-course on miniKanren and relational programming at the University of Kyoto.
Topics included: introduction to relational programming, translating functions to relations, relational interpreters in miniKanren, program synthesis via relational interpreter, and implementing microKanren.

Computer Science and My Life (arranged by Haochen Xie and Sicss Society; hosted and translated by Haochen Xie)
Keynote to open the Nagoya University Programming Seminar & Competition, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan, May 13, 2018.

miniKanren: a Family of Languages for Relational Programming
Fourteenth International Symposium on Functional and Logic Programming (FLOPS 2018), Nagoya, Japan, May 9, 2018.

miniKanren: a Family of Languages for Relational Programming (arranged by Haochen Xie and Sicss Society; hosted by Yasuhiko Minamide)
Tokyo Institute of Technology (Titech), Tokyo, Japan, May 7, 2018.

Lessons from Building an Interactive Biomedical Reasoning System (arranged by Haochen Xie and Sicss Society; hosted by Yoshihiro Imai/DWANGO; translation by Youyou Cong)
Public Sicss Society Event, DWANGO Building, Tokyo, Japan, May 6, 2018.

Personal Data Preservation, Inspired by Ancient Writing
Clojure/SYNC 2018, New Orleans, LA, February 15, 2018.

Implementing a Relational Programming Language in a Functional Language (with Nada Amin)
Cambridge NonDysFunctional Programmers Meetup, Cambridge, UK, January 23, 2018.

Logic Programming, Semantics, and a Bit of Cleverness
Logic and Semantics Seminar, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, January 23, 2018.

Relational Programming and Program Synthesis in miniKanren
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, January 18, 2018.

Program Synthesis with miniKanren
Code Mesh 2017, London, England, November 8, 2017.

The Reasoned Racketeers (keynote, with Daniel P. Friedman)
RacketCon, Seattle, WA, October 7, 2017.

Functional Pearl: A Unified Approach to Solving Seven Programming Problems (presentation of paper written with Michael Ballantyne, Greg Rosenblatt, and Matthew Might)
ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2017), Oxford, UK, September 4, 2017.

The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written
Papers We Love, New York, NY, April 12, 2017.

Synthesis of Lisp Programs
LispNYC, New York, NY, April 11, 2017.

Relational programming
KatsConf 2, Dublin, February 18, 2017.

Thinking About Recursion (with Nada Amin)
KatsConf 2, Dublin, February 18, 2017.

Barliman: Trying the Halting Problem Backwards, Blindfolded (with Greg Rosenblatt)
Clojure/conj, Austin, TX, December 3, 2016.

New Tools and Practices for Online Collaboration in Teaching, Learning, and Research of Programming Languages
Off-the-Beaten Track (co-located with POPL 2016), St. Petersburg, FL, January 23, 2016.

The Promise of Relational Programming
Partial Evaluation and Semantic-Based Program Manipulation (PEPM 2016), San Diego, CA, January 18, 2016.

miniKanren, a Language for Relational Programming} (CS242 guest lecture)
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, November 30, 2015.

A Vision for Relational Programming in miniKanren
Code Mesh 2015, London, England, November 4, 2015.

Concatenative Programming (with Rob Martin)
Code Mesh 2015, London, England, November 2, 2015.

Interpreting Scheme procedures as logic programs using miniKanren (with Michael Ballantyne)
Scheme and Functional Programming Workshop, Vancouver, Canada, September 4, 2015.

Summer School on Relational Programming (sponsored by JetBrains, courtesy of Dmitri Boulytchev)
St. Petersburg, Russia, August 24--28, 2015.

The Promise of Relational Programming
PolyConf, Poznan, Poland, July, 2015.

Write a Relational Scheme Interpreter in miniKanren
PolyConf, Poznan, Poland, July 2, 2015.

Concatenative Programming (with Rob Martin)
Lambda Lounge Utah, Sandy, UT, May 12, 2015.

Program Synthesis Using miniKanren (with Daniel P. Friedman)
Strange Loop, St. Louis, MO, September 17, 2014.

miniKanren Summer School (with Daniel P. Friedman and Jason Hemann)
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, May 27 and 29, 2014

Logic Night
Lambda Lounge Utah, Sandy, UT, May 13, 2014

We Need Real Tools for Generating Type Inferencers (with Nada Amin)
Off-the-Beaten Track (co-located with POPL 2014), San Diego, CA, January 25, 2014.

miniKanren Tutorial (with Daniel P. Friedman)
Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL), San Diego, January 23, 2014.

Relational Programming in miniKanren
The Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, December 6, 2013.

Meta-Programming in Logic Programming (with Nada Amin)
Code Mesh 2013, London, England, December 5, 2013.

From Greek to Clojure! (with Nada Amin)
Clojure/conj, Alexandria, VA, November 14, 2013.

A Relational Exploration of the Chomsky Hierarchy (with Daniel P. Friedman)
Strange Loop, St. Louis, MO, September 18--20, 2013.

Program Transformations (with Nada Amin)
Lambda Jam, Chicago, IL, July 9, 2013.

Fun with Relational Interpreters in miniKanren (with Daniel P. Friedman)
flatMap, Oslo, Norway, May 14, 2013.

The Unreasonable Schemers (guest of honor, with Daniel P. Friedman)
miniKanren Confo (associated with Clojure/West), Portland, OR, March 19, 2013.

miniKanren Philosophy (with Daniel P. Friedman)
Clojure/conj, Raleigh, NC, November 16, 2012.

Relational Programming in miniKanren (with Daniel P. Friedman)
Strange Loop, St. Louis, MO, September 24, 2012.

miniKanren, Live and Untagged: Quine Generation via Relational Interpreters
Scheme and Functional Programming Workshop, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 9, 2012.

Declarative Parallel Programming
Computer Science Department, Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, CO, February 29, 2012.

3D Printing, Open Hardware, and the DIY Revolution
CATALYST, Informatics and Computing Student Association, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, February 18, 2012.

Generating Quines Using a Relational Interpreter
Indiana University Logic Seminar, Bloomington, IN, February 15, 2012.

3D Printing, Open Hardware, and the DIY Revolution
Technology Management Club, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, February 7, 2012.

miniKanren ("Untalk", with Daniel P. Friedman)
Clojure/conj, Raleigh, NC, November 10, 2011.

3D Printing, Open Hardware, and the DIY Revolution
Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) Department, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, October 12, 2011.

Animatronic Kittehs, 3D Printers, and Rogue Game Studios --or-- Why Computer Science Education Should be Just-in-Time, not Just-in-Case, and Why (Epic) Failure Should Always be an Option
Indiana University Programming Languages Group, Bloomington, IN, April 15, 2011.

Interviews

Mostly Erlang Episode 050 -- miniKanren With William Byrd
Recorded by Zachary Kessin, Thursday, November 13, 2014.

Functional Geekery Episode 9 -- William E. Byrd
Recorded by Proctor, Monday, April 21, 2014

William Byrd on Logic and Relational Programming, miniKanren
Recorded by InfoQ at Code Mesh 2013, London, England, December, 2013

Teaching

C211 Introduction to Computer Science (undergraduate)
Course Instructor, Fall 2011 (Honors Section), Fall 2010 (Honors Section), Summer 2005
Associate Instructor, Honors Section, Fall 2003

C311 Programming Languages (undergraduate)
Associate Instructor, Spring 2009, Fall 2008, Spring 2008, Fall 2007, Spring 2007, Fall 2006, Spring 2006, Fall 2005, Spring 2005, Fall 2004, Spring 2004

B521 Programming Languages (graduate)
Associate Instructor, Fall 2008, Fall 2007, Fall 2006, Fall 2005, Fall 2004

A290 Tools for Computing: Arduino Development
Course Instructor, Spring 2012

Stanford Talk resources (November 2015)

St. Petersburg relational programming course resources (summer 2015)