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. My current research focuses on applications of machine learning to problems in computer systems and security. For these problems I work closely with faculty in the Systems and Networking Group. I have also worked in the areas of high dimensional data analysis, probabilistic graphical modeling, kernel methods, distance metric learning, and speech and audio processing.
I am currently Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Machine Learning Research. 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). My work on high dimensional data analysis was supported in part by an NSF CAREER Award. I served as Program Chair for NIPS-03 and General Chair for NIPS-04. In 1999, I was named as one of 100 top young innovators by Technology Review.
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