Professional / Research

I recently received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. My advisor was Manuela Veloso.

A AAAI paper describing some of my preliminary thesis work won a best-paper award at AAAI 2007.
See my publications page for a complete list of the papers I've (co-)authored. See my resume for full details about the research projects I've worked on.

For my doctoral thesis research, I investigated how teams of agents or robots can act near-optimally in timed, zero-sum games. In these domains, teams need to act in order to maximize the probability of winning, not necessarily to maximize their score. The general idea is that a team which is losing should act more aggressively to try to even the score, and a team which is winning should act more defensively to try to preserve their lead. I present algorithms which compute optimal policies for these timed domains, using Markov and semi-Markov models (MDPs and SMDPs). I also analyze how a team should change strategy in response to an opponent whose behavior is initially unknown but slowly reveals itself during execution. My thesis work has been applied to three challenging domains: the RoboCup robot soccer competition, a simulated Capture the Flag domain, and reCAPTCHA.

Personal

I'm a Minnesota native -- I grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis and attended the University of Minnesota as an undergraduate. I like Minnesota weather (Pittsburgh is too tropical!)

I've worked on numerous open-source software projects. See my software page for more information.

As a general rule, I like interactive entertainment and dislike non-interactive entertainment. I'm not a fan of TV or movies, but love board games, card games, video games, and reading. (Books count as interactive entertainment because a good book always makes you think... though I will admit I don't read nearly as much as I should.) I play tennis.

Trivia

I proposed to my wife by posting obfuscated Perl code on perlmonks.org. This led to my being mentioned in a Wikipedia article and the Piled Higher and Deeper comic strip (though my name was changed to "William" -- presumably to protect the innocent?)

I was Slashdotted in 2002 because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibited import of a serial cable that was meant to be used for a real-time systems class. I believe the DMCA has had a chilling effect on legitimate computer science research and should be repealed or struck down.

My Erdos number is <= 4:
Erdos -> Noga Alon -> Manuel Blum -> Luis von Ahn -> me.