ESP Biography



GEOFFREY THOMAS, MIT graduate student in computer science.




Major: Computer Science

College/Employer: MIT

Year of Graduation: G

Picture of Geoffrey Thomas

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I went to MIT for college and stayed another year-and-a-half to finish my master's degree. My research is on computer security using virtualization, and I've been a teaching assistant for MIT's second algorithms class as well as our two computer security classes. I'm also involved in a bunch of software development projects around MIT.



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

C5553: How Not To Run A Website in Splash! 2011 (Nov. 19 - 20, 2011)
It's 2011, and it's really easy for anyone to set up a website. It's much harder to set up a website that hackers aren't going to take over within a day. We'll look at many of the popular attacks on websites (including buzzwords like "SQL injection" and "clickjacking"), why these problems came about, and exactly how hard it is to avoid these problems.


C3182: Scheme in Spark! 2010 (Mar. 13, 2010)
Ever wanted to learn Scheme? Have you heard of functional programming, but never learned any functional languages? Come to our class, and we’ll teach you the basics of Scheme, and how to learn more.


C3220: The Unicode Standard 5.0: A Dramatic Reading in Spark! 2010 (Mar. 13, 2010)
In the history of alphabets and languages can be traced the history of man and the development of nations, and in the history of computer encodings of characters can be traced the history of computing and telecommunications. Join us for a journey through the Unicode standard, the standard for computer representation of text, encoding over 100,000 characters from around the world. In the process, we'll also learn the historical context behind the development of various languages, scripts, and pre-Unicode electronic encodings. We'll discuss such topics as Saints Cyril and Methodius, the "loopy" phi, whether Chinese, Japanese, and Korean should use the same character set, the English spelling reforms of George Bernard Shaw and of the Mormons, the letter G, handling bidirectional text, newlines, and the SMALL HIGH DOTLESS HEAD OF KHAH.


C3275: Operating Systems in Spark! 2010 (Mar. 13, 2010)
A remarkable amount of stuff happens "behind the scenes" when you press Alt+Tab on your computer to switch between your web browser playing a YouTube video and your word processor displaying that English assignment you're procrastinating on. Come to this class to learn about (a small fraction of) them!


C3021: Scheme in Splash! 2009 (Nov. 21 - 22, 2009)
Ever wanted to learn Scheme? Have you heard of functional programming, but never learned any functional languages? Come to our class, and we’ll teach you the basics of Scheme, and how to learn more.


"Turtle Graphics" and Functional Programming with Logo in SPLASHONWHEELS (2008)
Logo is a computer language where you tell an on-screen "turtle" to move around and draw patterns. Learn how to ...