Photo of me in Wakayama, Japan in May 2024
Benjamin R. Bray

I work as a research software engineer for Hasuo Lab at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, where I build software aimed at making formal methods more accessible to engineers working in industry.

These days, I’m most interested in working on:

  • Language servers, static analyzers, and compilers.
  • Interactive editors for composing rich text documents.
  • Computer graphics, simulation, and numerical methods.

I most often reach for TypeScript or Haskell when starting a new project. Recently I’ve also been learning Rust.

In my free time, I enjoy cycling, goats, dodgeball, long walks, and baking. Maybe one day I’ll make more games! If you’d like to chat, feel free to write me at benrbray@gmail.com.

Selected Projects

A collection of reference implementations of type inference algorithms, with particular emphasis on features which are necessary for practical implementations, such as error reporting.
A collection of plugins for the remark markdown processor adding support for pandoc-style inline citation syntax and bibliography formatting.
An open-source Markdown editor with bidirectional links and excellent math support!
Schema and plugins for writing mathematics in prosemirror, using KaTeX.
As an undergraduate research assistant, I spent three years as the primary developer for an NLP-driven web application built to assist a humanities professor with research on 19th-century German literature.
I used linear algebra to give my high school robotics team a competitive edge! Since robots compete in teams of three, an individual's contribution to the final score cannot be known. By scraping public match data and solving a linear system, I estimated an offensive power rating for each robot, which my team used to predict match outcomes and choose alliances.
A collection of Flash games I published to the Newgrounds game portal as a teenager.

Selected Posts