Shawn Ong

Shawn Ong serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Grinnell College, specializing in theoretical computation with focus on formal languages, grammars, and automata models that integrate nondeterminism and probability.

His educational background includes:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Cornell University (2025)
• B.A. and M.A. in Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania (2018)

Professor Ong's research pioneered a solution to a longstanding problem by implementing multisets for nondeterminism, enabling unified formal grammar and automaton models. Current work investigates model expressiveness boundaries and equivalence testing for computational expressions. His interests span:

• Computational complexity theory
• Formal language hierarchies
• Probabilistic automata
• Logic-based computation
• Uncertainty modeling frameworks

He actively explores whether computational problems can be classified by difficulty within his model and examines practical implications for algorithm design under uncertainty constraints.

Contact: ongshawn@grinnell.edu