Who Are You? What Do You Want?

I have no idea why you’re reading my website. You know better than I do. But here is a very little bit of information about me.

What?

I’m a PhD student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I’m trying to figure out reinforcement learning; in particular, I am working on ways to use goal-oriented exploration to learn what parts of rich sensor data contain useful information. Yes, a bold claim, which might be why I haven’t finished yet. There is progress, but as yet no publications :(

Where?

I grew up in Halifax and Chester. Chester is inhabited by about 2000 honest working souls in the winter and about 2000 more summer people. The fact that most of them (us) have been spending summers there for a hundred years leads to a strange feeling of belonging to the community, and yet not.

I went to school in Princeton, New Jersey “The Ground State”, and graduated with a BSE in Computer Science, so it was necessary for me to move out to the Silly Valley (yes, the water really is that colour) and make my fortune in a start-up. But the lifestyle wasn’t for me, so I moved back east to MIT’s Neuroscience Department and worked as a lab tech for the amazing lab of Sebastian Seung.

I’ve moved from Boston (well, Somerville, which is just about the same thing, really), where most of my dearest friends still live, to Boulder, Colorado. I currently live right about here (39.96739°N, 105.25303°W, 1730m).