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

Comp sci: I like computers.
Math: Though math is very helpful for understanding our most advanced technology, it's also quite interesting to think about why and how all these little things about the universe line up. I think Fourier analysis is cool.
Cog sci: 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? Should we be using computers at all? What can computers tell us about emergent complexity in the universe?^ⓘ
Linguistics & philosophy of language: How do we communicate? In what ways does language fail to capture reality? How are language and thought related? What are the connections between linguistics and computation?^ⓘ
Society: What can we learn from urbanism, human geography, social psychology, and economic history? Why is American politics so dysfunctional?

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

SWE intern at Ramp (summer '25, '26): Last summer, I built end-to-end invoicing workflows for the Vendor Portal, with a focus on clean UX. I worked with async job frameworks, implemented PDF rendering and OCR pipelines, integrated external APIs for tax info validation, built a new invite and onboarding flow, designed new UI surfaces, and more. The summer before that, I created bulk upload, download, and validation workflows for vendor documents, and 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 altruistic (in a game-theoretic sense) to perfectly 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. For instance, I 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 with nginx. 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.