Work
I am a Software Engineer at Sony AI in Portland, OR, where I help build reinforcement learning software.
Previously, I was at a Previously, I was a Data Engineer at Yieldbot where I helped choose ads, and a Senior Software Engineer at The Climate Corporation, where I worked on climate modeling. Before that, I commuted all the way from San Francisco to Mountain View to work at Google.
I got my Ph.D. in Computer Science graduate student at UC Berkeley, where I studied Artificial Intelligence. I worked with Jerome Feldman to represent complex real-world actions with a combination of probabilistic models (specifically, an extension of Bayes Nets called Probabilistic Relational Models) and process models (based on Petri Nets, which are fancy finite state machines). I demonstrated their use on simulated robotic soccer players. Here's a link to my dissertation.
I got my undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis.
Here are some things I have made:
Hobbies
I have had many hobbies through the years. These days, I don't do much, but I at least try to cook pretty well.
- I used to swim moderately seriously, and even swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco with the Embarcadero YMCA.
- I used to fly with the Berkeley Hang Gliding Club, and I have a Hang 3 rating.
- I used to be a blues dancer, and I even met my wife Caely at Beat the Blues, a Wednesday night venue in Berkeley.
- I used to play classical guitar quite seriously, and even got a small scholarship for it.
- I made this little tool, FindWords, a simple web application to find words with given letters (for word games)