Charlie Max Tharas

Hi! I hope you're having a good day. This is my website, which has some information about me and my life.

Education

I'll graduate from Williams College in 2027 with a BA in Computer Science & Mathematics and a concentration in Cognitive Science. I also studied abroad at Oxford for '25-'26, and will be completing an undergraduate thesis in Computer Science in '27.

Interests 🖱

Academic

Comp sci: I like computers.
Math: Although math is very pragmatically helpful for writing good code and understanding our most advanced technology, I'm more interested in why and how all these little things about the universe line up. I think Fourier analysis is cool.
Cog sci: What should we actually be using computers for? Can we use computers to think? Can we use computers to find out what thinking is? Can we use what we think thinking is to make better computers--or is that a red herring?
Philosophy: Should we be using computers at all? What can computers tell us about emergent complexity in the universe?^ⓘ
Linguistics: How do we communicate? How can we communicate better? Can we make machines that help? What is a language, and how do its features affect its failure to capture reality? What are the connections between linguistics and information theory?^ⓘ
Living Better: What can we learn from urbanism, human geography, social psychology, political science, and economic history? Why is American politics so dysfunctional?

Other

Software engineering/rock climbing
Caving
Surfing & snowboarding (previously worked as a surf instructor at Rockaway Beach, NY over the summer 🌊)
Classical guitar (shoutout Leo Brouwer)
ASL

You might want to check out my resume, but here's a quick overview:

Backend SWE intern at Ramp (summer '25, returning '26): Developed bulk upload and download features for vendor documents, including an async pipeline to extract and propagate document details to internal vendor profiles. Refactored S3 handling to settle some nasty tech debt.
Co-authored Mechanism Design Is Not Enough: Prosocial Agents for Cooperative AI: Worked with some folks affiliated with IDAI to show theoretically and empirically that in social dilemmas, agents must be (in a game-theoretic sense) altruistic to recover the social optimum; external mechanisms (e.g. contracts) are not sufficient.
Student developer for Williams Students Online: working with Williams students to improve microservices for our student-run website. Integrated professor reviews with our course scheduler and developed a major requirements planner and custom major editor.
Teaching assistant: TA'd CSCI 270 in fall '27, CSCI 237 in spring '25, and CSCI 136 in fall '24.

Also some older stuff:

Research assistant for Anna Plantinga: Benchmarked Solemate, a shoeprint matching pipeline.
Research assistant for Mark Hopkins and his thesis student: examined effects of low-resource bilingual vs. multilingual training on parallel and non-overlapping corpora with Meta's NLLB model.
Freelance developer for The Benson Place Farm: built out an old-school full-stack customized inventory management and order placement system using native JS and Go, hosted locally by reverse proxy. Now serving hundreds of customers a month!
Transportation researcher for Williams Center for Learning in Action: worked with a TDM^ⓘ coordinator to design a carpool web app, built out a backend using Go and GORM, researched mobility patterns in the Berkshires.
Research intern for MSKCC MIND: high school summer internship, worked on CV models to identify cell features, collaborated with data engineers to streamline the training pipeline for non-tech-savvy pathologists.
COO (and various other roles) at Steel City Codes: (also high school) managed operations for a large^ⓘ nonprofit; conducted outreach, hired and onboarded tutors and administrative staff, organized sponsored events, raised money, planned hackathons, designed curricula. Started as a tutor in 2020.