about me
I am a third-year graduate student in the Computer and Information Science (CIS) Department at the University of Pennsylvania. I am co-advised by Ben Taskar and Michael Kearns, and I'm studying practical and theoretical machine learning, with an emphasis on structured prediction. I am a member of the GRASP Lab and the Penn Research in Machine Learning (PRIML) research groups. Ultimately, I hope to promote the integration of machine learning and neuroscience, to change the way we analyze and understand our minds.
Previously, I was a research specialist at the Princeton Computational Memory Lab. I graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Computer Science and a certificate in Neuroscience in 2007, advised by Dave Blei (CS) and Ken Norman (Psychology).
In addition, I am a member of Team Dinosaur Planet, Grand Prize Team, and The Ensemble, the greatest Netflix wrecking crew ever created. I'm also a founding software developer of MedForward Inc., and a developer of the MVPA Toolbox for Matlab.
I married my high school sweetheart Gillian Braden-Weiss (née Braden) in May of 2008.
research interests
Here is a supplementary video from my most recent paper explaining our graphical model for human limb tracking, along with some results:
My other research interests include:
- Machine learning. Building predictive models that help us better understand the vast amount of data in the world around us.
- Structured Prediction. Learning to jointly predict sets of variables by modeling interdependencies poses unique computational and theoretical challenges.
- Learning theory. Developing provably efficient and accurate learning algorithms.
- Mind-reading. Improving pattern recognition techniques to decode brain-state (i.e., ``thoughts'') from recordings of neural activity.
- Data-mining the brain. Uniting computer science and neuroscience to infer the hidden processes inside our minds.