I was born and raised in southern California, where I am happy to have finally returned after a twenty-year odyssey on the East Coast. I received my A.B. in Physics from Harvard College (1990) and my Ph.D. in Physics from M.I.T. (1994). I stayed at M.I.T. for two more years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Biological and Computational Learning, then joined the research wing of AT&T Labs in Murray Hill (and later Florham Park), NJ. In 2002, I joined the faculty of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006, I moved back to southern California to join the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.
I am a faculty member in the Artificial Intelligence Group and the Computer Audition Lab. I joined UCSD as part of a campus-wide effort to grow in the areas of Computational Statistics and Machine Learning. My research focuses on statistical methods for pattern recognition and voice and audio processing. My work is supported in part by an NSF CAREER Award. In 1999, I was named as one of 100 top young innovators by Technology Review. I served as Program Chair for NIPS-03 and General Chair for NIPS-04. My students and I have won outstanding paper awards at international conferences in machine learning (ICML-04), computer vision (CVPR-04), artificial intelligence (AISTATS-05), and neural information processing (NIPS-06). I am currently Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Machine Learning Research.
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